Hunting

The clearances and grubbing up of the forest settings of the Robin Hood ballads was not just an economic phenomenon. It posed a deeper conundrum for the aristocracy. Since 1066, indeed probably since Roman times, the forests of England had been a specifically aristocratic resource, with the hunting of deer as the ultimate advertisement of aristocratic privilege. To a peasant who saw his lord thundering on horseback across forest pathways and winter fields, there can have been few more obvious proofs of lordly privilege. Hunting manuals and the rituals of the hunt remained central to the concerns of the fifteenth-century gentry and aristocracy. Virtually all kings hunted, even the generally soft-sworded Richard II or Henry VI. Henry VI hunted, even though he is said to have abhorred the actual slaughter of game. His courtiers brought their hawks with them into church. Of Richard II’s favourites, Simon Burley was keeper of the King’s falcons, and Robert de Vere is said to have been killed whilst hunting wild boar. The greatest of the medieval hunting manuals, the Livre de Chasse composed in the 1380s by the southern French nobleman Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, not only formed an essential item in every gentleman’s library but was translated into English by no less a figure than Edward, Duke of York, grandson of Edward III, killed at Agincourt in 1415. The hunting of deer was still regarded as the ultimate aristocratic pastime, even as late as the reign of Charles I. But the fox was already regarded as a beast of the chase, with fox hunting itself favouring a landscape cleared of timber. From a clear run across plough and the excitement of fences came the racing of horses, steeple-chasing and all those other pursuits that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were to replace the deer of old England as the true sport of kings. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, kings favoured Windsor in order to be close to their deer and their forests. By 1700, they had transferred their affections from the greenwood to the heath-lands of Newmarket or Ascot. Kingship had come out from the trees.