(^126) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
peasant farms; and one dominated by grass rather than by arable. The former
allowed hunters to pursue the fox without the objections of proprietors; the
latter ensured that its scent held up well, as well as allowing the horses to ride
fast, without damaging standing crops.^65 The enclosure and grassing-down
of the Midland ‘shires’ in the course of the eighteenth century produced
(in the words of the writer Surtees) a landscape comprising ‘grass, grass,
grass, nothing but grass for miles and miles’, ideally suited to hunting.^66 The
emergence of the most notable hunts, like the Quorn or Pytcheley, thus went
hand-in-hand with the spread of enclosure.^67
This plausible story has, however, recently been questioned by Jon Finch
and Jane Bevan.^68 The earliest organized hunts in England actually began,
in the late seventeenth century, in unenclosed chalkland areas, such as the
Wolds of Yorkshire, and they were well established in the Midlands before
- There, huntsmen shunned areas already enclosed, preferring to hunt
across the surviving open fields and changed the location of their activities
as enclosure proceeded. They avoided, wherever possible, jumping hedges
and other obstacles, preferring a clean run across open ground, following
the ribbons of unploughed ground beside slades, and the various ‘green
ends’ and cow commons; or riding across the wide expanses of the fallow
fields.^69 The Midlands rose to prominence as the character of the sport itself
developed, reflecting changes in the landscape. The ploughing up of wolds,
downs and heaths in light soil areas reduced the number of foxes to be
found there and, together with the virtual eradication of fallows, made it
harder to ride uninterrupted for long distances. In the Midlands, in contrast,
the area of pasture increased with enclosure. By the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, hunters were beginning to take pride in jumping the new
hedges.^70
Hunting made its own particular contribution to the environment.
Enclosure removed many of the areas of rough ground where foxes could
find shelter, so that landowners were obliged to establish coverts – small areas
of gorse and other scrub, often planted with a few ornamental trees – where
foxes could breed in safety, and where huntsmen could expect to find their
quarry. These developed, through natural succession, into the small woods
in field corners which are often found in the Midlands, and sporadically
elsewhere.^71 Some hunts even created artificial earths, networks of brick
tunnels, to encourage the fox to breed. Fox hunting was less damaging to
wildlife than game shooting, for the fox had no predators which keepers
needed to persecute. The establishment of coverts provided some, admittedly
fairly marginal, additions to local habitats; and while many thousands of
individual foxes met with an untimely and brutal end, everything possible
was done to encourage the fox as a species. Indeed, it has been argued that,
without the rise of organized hunting, the fox might well have disappeared
altogether from large areas of England, such was the scale of persecution by
farming communities and gamekeepers.^72