Medieval Hunting
Page 8
THREE
‘Bestis’ and ‘Crafte’
The medieval classification of quarry species is complex and confusing, much depending upon which source is consulted. Broadly, the quarry species which are illustrated in most pictorial sources and figure in almost all textual sources are the red deer stag or hart, the red deer hind, the hare, the wild boar, the wolf and the bear. These beasts were traditionally categorised as ‘noble’ and their lawful pursuit identified the hunter as a ‘gentle hunter’. Some French and English hunting books divide game into two distinct categories, the ‘beasts of venery’ and the ‘beasts of the chase’.1 Additional categories of folly or rascal and vermin are sometimes mentioned.2 In general, gentle hunters pursued the first two categories of quarry, at least publicly, the first group being regarded as the most prestigious. William Twiti, huntsman to Edward II and author of The Art of Venerie, gives the basic classification:
To venery y caste me fyrst to go/ Of wheche iiii bestis be, that is to say,/ The hare, the hert, þe wulfe, the wylde boor also;/ Of venery for sothe þer be no moe . . .
And then ben othyr bestis v of chase:/ The buck the first, the do the secunde,/ The fox the thryde, which ofte haþ hard grace,/ The ferthe the martyn & þe last the Roo,/ And sothe to say ther be no mo of tho . . .’3
Juliana Berners’ Boke of Huntyng declares ‘Fowre maner beestys of venery there are,/ The first of theym is the hert, the secunde is the hare,/ The boore is oon of tho,/ The wolff, and not oon moo.’4 Later, the Boke continues with the beasts of chase but also introduces the category of ‘rascal’ or, in other words, everything else:
I shall yow tell which be beestys of enchace./ Oon of theym is the bucke, a nother is the doo,/ The fox and the martron and the wilde roo./ And ye shall, my dere chylde, other beestys all,/Where so ye hem fynde, rascall ye shall hem call/ In fryth or in fell/ Or in forest, I yow tell.5
Notice that Dame Juliana does not mention the red deer hind, but David Dalby comments as an aside to German stag-hunting practice that ‘Hinds were sometimes hunted with hounds, and were usually driven into nets rather than pursued across country’.6 Hinds gave inferior sport to harts as they did not run so strongly and in consequence were regarded as mere suppliers of venison. There was thus no shame in driving them, sometimes in groups, into fixed nets.
The bear does not feature in The Art of Venerie or the Boke of Huntyng, the logical reason for its exclusion being its complete extinction in England centuries earlier.7 However, it was still common on mainland Europe in the late medieval period and was hunted both on horseback and on foot, particularly in southern and mountainous regions. Bears were hunted on horseback with hounds by the princes and nobles of the north Italian city states in the Renaissance.8 Both Gaston Fébus and Emperor Maximilian I regarded bears as worthy and dangerous quarry.9
Pictorial and textual sources clearly indicate that it was the red deer which was the favourite quarry species of medieval aristocratic hunters. For example, while the cycle of twelve hunting illustrations in the Calendar of MS Egerton 1146 includes the five major quarry species, there is a heavy emphasis on red deer. The frequency is as follows: red deer appear seven times, wild boar twice, and the hare, bear and wolf only once each. Overall, it is the stag, or more correctly the hart, with its great rack of antlers, that dominates both textual and pictorial sources as the icon of nobility hunting. Referring specifically to Germany, but equally applicable to the rest of Europe, David Dalby states ‘During the German Middle Ages, the stag was the most important quarry for noble huntsmen . . . and other deer are mentioned less frequently.’10 He later remarks ‘the stag chase became the favourite hunting sport during the “courtly centuries”’ meaning after the twelfth century. Stag hunting required a high degree of skill and technical know-how, and importantly involved much élitist ritual, making it suitable as a courtly pastime.11 One German manual illustrates the importance of the stag to German noble hunters by its very specialisation. Die Lehre von den Zeichen des Hirsches is an instructive examination of the tracks and signs of the stag, all indications of whether the beast was chaseable.12 A sixteenth-century German hunting manual, Die Hohenloheschen Handschrift, contains a series of detailed diagrams showing the different slot-marks (tracks) of deer for the instruction of hunters assessing age, size and condition of quarry.13 In the appendix to his edition of The Master of Game, William Baillie-Grohman emphasises the expertise required of both the professional and aristocratic stag hunter and notes that:
One of the first essentials for a huntsman in the Middle Ages was to learn to know the different signs of a stag (according to German Venery there were seventy-two signs), so as to be able to ‘judge well’. These signs were those of the slot, the gait, the fraying-post, the rack or entry (i.e. the place where the stag entered covert), and the fumes.14
It was the ‘great hart’, however, which held the premier position as noble quarry. These beasts, at least six years old with ten points or tines to their rack of antlers, were often described as warrantable in the hunting treatises.15 The Master of Game specifies the male red deer as correctly being termed as in ‘the fifth [year] a stag; the sixth year a hart of ten and first is he chaseable, for always before shall he be called rascal or folly’.16 The hart was regarded as royal game, and so belonged to the king or ruler of the country. Hunting the wild hart was thus a royal prerogative and a courtly activity, although special licences to take red deer and other game were granted on occasion by the sovereign to specially favoured courtiers.17 The social primacy of the hart is indicated by two early hunting texts. The surviving version of De arte bersandi, written by Guicenna(n)s in Germany in the early thirteenth century, is the beginning of a comprehensive instruction on the hart hunt. It is also the earliest medieval hunting text which survives and the only known hunting treatise written in Latin. The earliest vernacular hunting treatise is La Chase dou cerf, written in Picardy in about 1250. This poem treats of all aspects of the hart hunt, from the chase to breaking-up the carcass.18
Edward of York’s observations make it clear why the hart was regarded with such esteem throughout Europe ‘The harts be the lightest beasts and strongest, and of marvellous great cunning.’19 They were also fierce and dangerous quarry and therefore worthy of the respect of noble hunter-warriors. As Edward graphically describes:
And then they are bold, and run upon men as a wild boar would do if he were hunted. And they be wonderfully perilous beasts, for with great pain shall a man recover that is hurt by a hart, and therefore men say in old saws, ‘after the boar the leech and after the hart the bier.’ For he smiteth as the stroke of the springole, for he has great strength in the head and the body.20
The risks of injury or death while out hunting are seldom mentioned by the authors of the hunting books, so this rare grim reminder is interesting as well as thought-provoking. Understatement of the dangers of hunting and other noble pastimes was characteristic of medieval aristocratic culture and to some extent has endured as part of English ‘stiff upper-lip’ attitudes.
Because of its admirable warrior-like natural characteristics, the hart was thus elevated in medieval minds to a special position of ‘nobility’, making its pursuit a ‘noble sport’ and in turn bestowing high status and glory on its hunter. However, unfortunately for aristocratic hunters, numbers of the red, or ‘high’, deer in England fell dramatically during the later Middle Ages. This decline was largely the result of a decrease in suitable habitat, much former wilderness and waste being brought under cultivation, particularly as grazing for sheep, the mainstay of England’s premier industry. Felling timber for charcoal burning, iron, copper and lead smelting also reduced wild red deer habitat. In addition, much of the land used for game reserves and parks was also used to provide grazing and timber, and in order for this dual function to work careful woodland and pasture management was necessary. Woodlands which were excessively exploited became degraded, the classic case being Thorpe Wood which lay across the River Wensum near Norw
ich. In 1100 it was covered in oak woodland, but owing to overgrazing and excessive timber extraction it had degraded to heathland and been renamed Mousehold Heath by the early sixteenth century.21 Roger Manning estimates that by 1539 the numbers of red deer in the royal game reserves in the north of England had dwindled to around two thousand. In southern England it was necessary to boost low numbers by breeding programmes in parks. Stags are notoriously aggressive during the rutting season so imparked red and fallow deer had to be kept apart. Herds of red deer were still to be found in Windsor Forest, Ashdown Forest and at least three other parks in Sussex in the reign of James I.22 So, although the great hart survived in the English hunting manuals as the premier large quarry of the nobility, in reality its place was increasingly taken by the imparked fallow buck, an animal which was far more available and still gave good sport. Stocks in Forests and private parks were partly maintained by buckstalls and deer-leaps. The buckstall was a woodland enclosure, surrounded by a fence of wattle hurdles within which was a broad and deep ditch called the deer-leap. The low fence allowed driven deer to leap into the enclosure but the deep ditch on the other side prevented them from escaping. The captive deer would be fed ivy, holly, oak twigs and other browsings within the fenced enclosure until they were required for stocking or meat.23 Another function of these one-way structures was to allow tenants to drive deer from the unenclosed Forest into their own fenced preserves. In addition, it allowed access by hunters in the surrounding Forest who were following up wounded deer which had taken refuge in the park. This was an arrangement of benefit to both parties: the owner of the game rights and his tenant.24
Although fierce and brave, the wild boar comes a poor second in the nobility stakes. Its relative position is commented upon by Dalby ‘Of lesser importance than the stag in the medieval hunt was the wild boar. The boar hunt is mentioned or described in MHG [Middle High German] sources much less frequently than the stag chase.’ He continues that the boar was more dangerous to hunt than the stag and required great skill with a weapon to despatch. Hunting boar was a less refined sport than stag hunting and was the dominant form of the chase in German lands until the eleventh or twelfth centuries. The boar is often compared to a fierce warrior in the German sources, reflecting an earlier and more heroic age.25 This imagery is similar to that awarded to the hart and in the same way made the boar a worthy and noble adversary. Gaston Fébus approved of hunting the boar and in Livre de chasse devotes eleven chapters and illustrations to its nature, hunting and trapping.26 He considered the wild boar the most dangerous quarry, admiring and respecting the fierceness of the beast.27
The Master of Game translates only one of the chapters on the wild boar from Fébus, but Baillie-Grohman comments that the reason for this omission was probably because Edward of York considered the stag and hare to be ‘the royal sport par excellence, and not because there were none to hunt in England in his day’.28 It is quite probable that wild boar were extinct in the wild in England by the mid-thirteenth century, but what is interesting is that they were still regarded as ‘noble beasts’ by aristocratic families and lived on, not only in semi-captivity in parks but also in the public mind in heraldry and romance.29 A boar appears in The Luttrell Psalter (1320/40), but as he lacks hair and has distinct dark skin patches, he is probably a domestic rather than a wild pig.30 In comparison, Pisanello’s Wild Boar (c. 1430–35), appears to be the authentic hairy forest monster.31 The late fifteenth-century Boke of Huntyng contains specific information on the aging and procedures of undoing the wild boar,32 so in aristocratic minds it must still have been an existing beast of venery in England. It continued to thrive on mainland Europe, extensive forests being essential to its survival, and was hunted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and dedication by royalty and the nobility. However, to judge by the surviving manuals and by its appearances and role in imaginative literature, the boar was most valued as a quarry species in the Iberian Peninsula and Germany.33
The third beast of venery is the hare and both late medieval English and French hunters regarded this animal with great esteem. William Twiti begins his treatise with the hare, a sign of its quarry status, as he deems it ‘þe most merveylous beste þat is in þis lond’, the reasons being ‘For as miche as he beriþe grese and crotyth and rongith’.34 By this he meant that the hare produced grease, voided excrement and was a ruminant, thus having the ability to chew the cud. This latter point is not in fact correct as the hare does not have a compound stomach; she can, however, regurgitate food and give it a second mastication.35 Edward, Duke of York, repeats this sentiment almost word for word,36 a good example of the plagiarism which is a feature of the late medieval hunting books. He places the hare first in chapter order in The Master of Game, reversing the order of Livre de chasse, thus emphasising the hare’s importance to English aristocratic hunters. Gaston Fébus also regards the hare highly and gives it much space in his text, but places it second to the deer in chapter order, reflecting the priorities of French veneurs. John Cummins comments that hunting the hare ‘par force . . . was a microcosm of the most complex and subtle aspects of the medieval chase’.37 The widespread appeal of hare coursing with greyhounds lay in the long chase and also, very importantly for keen hunters, that it could be practised at any time of day or year. Nor did coursing require the elaborate preparation of the stag hunt; hence it was more suitable as an informal pastime.38 While this may seem at odds with the importance of ritual and procedure in the stag hunt, in spite of the informality of coursing it was clearly regarded as an aristocratic sport in England and France. Coursing was also cheaper than stag or boar hunting and the danger and excitement were provided by the extended chase, not by the quarry, again unlike the pursuit of the hart or wild boar. Surprisingly, this lack of the ‘warrior’ aspect of the hare does not appear to have detracted from its value as a noble quarry. It is significant that German sources of the period show that stag hunting and hare coursing were the pre-eminent forms of the chase, as practised by the German nobility during the Middle Ages’.39
The high status and popularity of the hare as a quarry species in England are reflected in its widespread appearance in pictorial sources. The hare often appears in the margins of illuminated manuscripts as a hunter of men, exemplifying the ‘world upside-down’ of medieval moralists and satirists in which role reversal and topsy-turvy situations upset the divine rational order of things. A well-known bas de page from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, shows two hunter-hares, one with a crossbow, the other carrying the quarry, a man with bound hands, from a game-pole, while a smirking leveret looks on in admiration.40 However, it was not only illuminators who used the hare in such imagery. Painters and wood-carvers did too. The Brabantine painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) provides an excellent example in his triptych Garden of Earthly Delights. The right wing illustrates Hell and in the foreground a large hare, readily identifiable by his long ears with dark tips, blows a hunting horn and carries his slain quarry, a shapely woman bleeding profusely from a huge gash in her belly, slung from the type of pole commonly used for carrying hares and rabbits on hunting forays.41 In the right wing of another triptych, Haywain, Bosch has used world upside-down imagery in a slightly different way. In the foreground of the hell scene, a devil-hunter blows his horn and carries his human quarry on a game-pole, a man paunched from throat to genitals like a hare or rabbit.42 Wood-carvers also utilised such humorous world upside-down imagery, and hunter-hares appear on some misericords in ecclesiastical settings. Thus this situation of hunter turned hunted is found on a misericord in Manchester Cathedral where hares roast a hunter on a spit over a fire while his hounds boil and are seasoned in cauldrons. This scene, inaccurately called The Rabbits’ Revenge as the animals are hares, was copied by the Manchester wood-carver from an elaborate engraving by Israhel van Meckenem (d. 1503).43
Although long extinct in Britain, bears were abundant in Europe and outlasted wolves in the Alps.44 In continental hunting treatises, the
bear was included as ‘noble’ quarry for aristocratic hunters. In his Foreword to the first edition of The Master of Game, President Theodore Roosevelt, an acknowledged historian and sportsman, comments ‘The kings and nobles, and the freemen generally, of the regions which now make up France and Germany, followed not only wolf, boar, and stag . . . but [also] the bear.’45 Gaston Fébus devotes several chapters to the nature and hunting of the bear. It must have been a familiar quarry in the Pyrenees as Fébus begins by saying ‘Ours est assez comune beste, si ne me covient ja dire de sa faisson, quar pou de gens sont qui bienn’en aient veu.’ He respected the beast for its great strength but not for its low intellect ‘il sont tous estourdiz, et, si fort y sont feruz’.46 Rather ironically, Fébus died in 1391 after returning from a bear hunt in the forest of Sauveterre.47 In Iberia the bear had high quarry status, both Alfonso XI of Castile and John I of Portugal regarding it as royal game.48 The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I was also an ardent bear-hunter. In his book Thuerdank, there are three sections on bear hunting and in his Hunting Notebook Maximilian advises ‘You must go hunting with a spear, and always have one – go after him with the spear . . .’.49 His favourite method was to tackle the beast in its lair, on foot and single-handed, armed only with a short hunting spear or hunting sword.50 This almost suicidally brave technique reflects Maximilian’s regard for the fighting qualities and courage of the bear, making it a worthy foe to take on face-to-face. The bear thus emerges as a personal challenge to the fanatical hunter, rather than as a quarry beast providing a prolonged and exciting chase. In spite of dedicated enthusiasts such as Fébus, Alfonso XI and Maximilian, opinions on the big beast varied and The Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt says of the bear ‘Amongst other heavy game . . . even the brown bear is of little importance’.51 German sources do mention the bear but its value as a quarry species is generally regarded as being considerably inferior to that of the stag, boar and hare. However, bears sometimes feature in manuscripts and MS Egerton 1146, a Germanic manuscript, has two illuminated illustrations of these beasts. In the bas de page of October in the Calendar, the mounted hunter thrusts a cross-hilted spear into a huge black bear which is being harried by hounds, whereas in a marginal illustration the hunter is on foot, using a long spear to despatch the bear.52