by Daniel Pool
As a rule, people did not go in for great soaring leaps over fences—such feats were very risky and required a good deal of skill. “No hunting man ever wants to jump if he can help it,” wrote Trollope flatly in Can You Forgive Her?
Not everyone had a benign view of the sport. Oscar Wilde called fox hunting “the pursuit of the uneatable by the unspeakable.” The farmers whose crops were trampled by hunters or whose lambs were eaten by foxes imported when the indigenous supply ran low sometimes became clandestine midnight fox killers.
VERMIN, POACHERS, AND KEEPERS
Game was defined legally as hare, partridge, pheasant, black game (black grouse), red grouse, and bustard. A law was passed in 1671 restricting the right to hunt game to people with a freehold of at least £1,000 a year or a leasehold of at least £150—in other words, the aristocracy and the gentry. This was the law until 1831. No one else could hunt game. Period.
This meant that the only way for anyone else to get game was to poach it, for which you were fined five pounds or put in jail for three months. It was also illegal to sell game or to possess dead game if you did not meet the law’s property qualification, and if you were poaching at night with at least two other people and one of you had a weapon, you could be sent to Australia for seven to fourteen years or sentenced to hard labor in England. And these laws were enforced—perhaps not surprisingly since the local justices of the peace were often the same landowners on whose land the poachers—if they were caught—would be caught trespassing. In fact, the laws were enforced so strictly that during the three years ending in 1830 one out of every seven people found guilty of a crime was convicted for violating the game laws.
These laws became a most bitter source of class friction in rural England. As industrialization spread and the enclosures diminished the supply of public land available for grazing and gathering fuel, the poor tried to supplement their income by trapping game, either for their own use as food or for sale on the black market in London. Game was considered a great delicacy and a thoughtful gift, partly because, like alcohol during Prohibition, it was hard to come by. (Poached game was preferred by the discriminating, because it had to be trapped with wires or nets—not shot—due to the need to trap silently to avoid discovery.) Thackeray talks in Vanity Fair of how one must butter up a rich relative who comes to visit: “What good dinners you have—game every day.” Local poachers who had the touch would hand their game over to coachmen who would smuggle it to London, where it would be sold by poulterers who presumably didn’t ask too many questions.
Many landowners put their gamekeepers to watching the woods at night for poachers, and they set spring guns with wires attached to the triggers running off into the woods to blow the head off whoever sneaked in to get a pheasant at night. Man-traps were also popular. These were like traps for animals except bigger; a substantial one weighed eighty-eight pounds and had teeth one and a half inches long that snapped shut on the leg and could do serious damage. Both devices, however, were completely legal until 1827, although they were unable to discriminate between the lawbreaker and the casual stroller. But, as Lord Ellenborough serenely observed: “The object of setting spring-guns was not personal injury to any one, but to deter from the commission of theft; and that object was as completely obtained by hitting an innocent man as a guilty one.”
At the same time poaching was becoming a nuisance to landed gentlemen, “shooting” was becoming more and more of a systematic, large-scale enterprise. For the first time, people began stocking and breeding pheasant for their coverts (wooded areas) in large numbers. Breeding pheasant was not cheap; it could run £500 to £700 a year on a large estate. It was therefore the task of the gamekeeper to keep the poachers away from the pheasant, protect and nurture the young game, and destroy any vermin. There were always plenty of vermin. “Vermin” included weasels, stoats, badgers, otters, foxes, hawks and owls and any other creatures who ate the eggs of young game or preyed on mature specimens. But raising all this wonderfully healthy game was a nightmare for farmers on the estate where they were raised because the pheasant ate their corn. “Squire Cass had a tenant or two,” George Eliot tells us in Silas Marner, “who complained of the game to him quite as much as if he had been a lord.” It is a measure of the rural landowners’ power that it was not legal for a tenant farmer to kill any game that attacked his crops until 1881.
Sometimes some of the locals—and friends, too—could be mollified by letting them come shoot with you. If, as was often the case, they didn’t meet the property qualifications for shooting specified by the law of 1671, you “deputized” them to shoot by virtue of your own right to do so. When Admiral Croft talks of trying to rent a house from Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, Sir Walter’s lawyer friend assures the reluctant baronet that Admiral Croft will not be a demanding tenant and “would be glad of the deputation, certainly, but made no great point of it;—said he sometimes took out a gun, but never killed—.” This allowed friends to be invited in early fall to come shooting grouse at a country place in the north. (Grouse shooting ran from August 12 through November, the partridge season from September to January, and the pheasant season from October to January.)
Game began to be hunted as well as raised more systematically in the 1800s. In the old days Squire Ralph set off with his favorite dog, and they tramped through the woods all day until he found a pheasant, whereupon the pheasant—startled—rose up toward freedom and the good squire blasted—or tried to blast—the daylights out of him. In the nineteenth century, however, this solitary pursuit of rather inconsequential amounts of game by individual hunters was increasingly replaced by mass animal hunts that became a staple feature of late Victorian weekends at country houses. Instead of the solitary hunter there were now shooting “parties” or groups that went on “battues,” where nets were raised up to keep the game from flying away from the shooters as “beaters” walked through the fields in front of the sportsmen and drove the game up into the air. It therefore became possible to shoot birds in large numbers. In 1876, the Maharajah Duleep Singh slaughtered 2,530 partridge in two weeks; in 1864, at Lord Stamford’s park over the three days from January 4 to January 7, hunters killed 4,045 pheasant, 3,902 rabbits, 860 hares, 59 woodcocks, and 28 creatures described as “various.” A certain Lord Ripon alone between 1867 and 1900 killed 142,343 pheasant, 97,759 partridge, 56,460 grouse, 29,858 rabbits, and 27,686 hares. A major theme of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is, of course, the destruction of the traditional English countryside, and Hardy describes Tess awakening after a night in the woods to find pheasants lying about her, “their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted.” They are, she realizes, victims of a shooting party that have dragged themselves away after being hit but not killed.
“Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found them till the gamekeepers should come—as they probably would come—to look for them a second time.”
FAIRS AND MARKETS
Fairs and markets were among the major events and diversions for country people during the period before 1800 and for a long time afterward. Markets dating back hundreds of years were often weekly affairs in rural areas, places where people came to sell their cheese, grain, milk, cattle, and the like and also to buy things they needed such as hats, shoes, farm implements, and so on. For many villages with few or no shops, the weekly market day was the sole chance to get these items.
Fairs were grander events, held usually once a year and often, unlike the markets, not in the town itself but in the countryside nearby, frequently in the late spring or after the autumn harvest so as not to conflict with farm work. The annual Weydon Fair at which Henchard sells his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, takes place on September 15. Around then, farm laborers would have received
their harvest wages, servants their Michaelmas pay if that was when their term of service ended, and everybody would be ready for one last good time before the winter set in.
Some fairs were very grand. The great Goose Fair in October at Nottingham opened with a formal procession of the mayor and aldermen in their scarlet robes, a trumpet blowing, and beadles marching along with their staves. Six acres of marketplace, said a contemporary observer, were “jammed full of stalls, shows, bazaars, and people.” In the morning farmers’ daughters would sit by their family’s cheeses as the cheese dealers made their purchases, while horse buyers haggled and swapped talk with the horse traders. (“Many hundreds of horses and sheep had been exhibited and sold in the forenoon,” Hardy says of the Weydon Fair.) By noontime at Nottingham, business would be winding down, and from then till eleven or midnight there was dancing, flirting, and entertainment—traveling shows (like the one in which Sergeant Troy appears in Far from the Madding Crowd), cockfights, smockraces in which women competed, wrestling, magic shows, and rope dancers. Fairs were a magnet for the young and single, and the relaxed, exhilarating atmosphere meant that single servants who were generally denied any opportunities for courting by their masters often produced a number of pregnancies in the ensuing months. At Nottingham, in fact, the “quality” let the lower orders have the fair all to themselves on the first day and did not come to enjoy things themselves until the second.
There were also what were called “statute” or “hiring” fairs or “mops.” Held generally around Michaelmas, or sometimes at Martinmas or Christmas, or in May, these were pre-employment-bureau gatherings at which a farmer or the master of a household could hire agricultural workers or household servants for the upcoming farm season or year. These fairs persisted until well into the nineteenth century—in Tess we are told of “the Candlemas Fair. It was at this fair that new engagements were entered into for the twelve months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the farming population who thought of changing their places duly attended at the county-town where the fair was held.” Gabriel Oak is driven to seek work at such a fair at the beginning of Far from the Madding Crowd after he loses his sheep. Typically, each worker wore a distinctive article of clothing to identify the position he was seeking to fill. “Carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands,” Hardy tells us, “and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.” Bargains were sealed at these fairs with a handshake and a payment of “earnest money” (sometimes called a “fastening penny”), a token sum designed to show the employer’s good faith. In the afternoon, with the bargaining out of the way, the servants and laborers danced and had fun.
“READER, I MARRIED HIM”
until 1823, a man or woman under the age of twenty-one could not marry without parental permission. This is one reason why Pride and Prejudice involves a clandestine elopement, and why the nineteen-year-old Isabella Linton dashes off into the night with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to be married without telling her parents. Note that the action of both these novels takes place long before Queen Victoria ascended the throne. After 1823, this particular source of melodrama was not available to a novelist; a boy was legally able to marry without consent at age fourteen and a girl when she turned twelve.
You could not marry your deceased wife’s sister—“she is my sister-in-law,” objects Angel Clare at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles when, knowing she must die, Tess tells him to marry her sister. On the other hand, you could—and many did—marry your cousin, including your first cousin. Mr. Collins proposes to various Bennet cousins in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and her cousin St. John River consider marriage, and first cousins Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw marry in Wuthering Heights. This attitude did not change until the end of the century, when we find Jude Fawley thinking apropos of his feelings for his own cousin Sue Bridehead that they are not quite right.
Courtship was a very serious matter indeed. Can You Forgive Her? asks Trollope of his readers when they learn that Alice Vavasor has changed her mind several times about marrying. Echoing an apparently not uncommon Victorian sentiment, she agonizingly asks herself, “Am I a jilt?” There was, perhaps, a sound economic as well as emotional reason for this impatience with female uncertainty. Since for many years, by law virtually all of a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage, his courtship was in some measure a career move as well as a search for a life partner. Thus, to lead him on would be to ask him to make a bad investment of his time. Indeed, when rich or upper-class people got married, a wife generally brought a generous dowry with her as an inducement to marriage. “Once a woman has accepted an offer of marriage,” advised The What-Not, or Ladies’ Handbook in 1859, “all she has or expects to have becomes virtually the property of the man she has accepted as husband and no gift or deed executed by her is held to be valid; for were she permitted to give away or otherwise settle her property between the period of acceptance and the marriage he might be disappointed in the wealth he looked to in making an offer.”
There was little false delicacy about this sort of economic maneuvering. Indeed the financial aspects of an impending marriage were considered quite openly. A contemporary courtship etiquette manual says very straightforwardly that once you propose, “your course is to acquaint the parents or guardians of the lady with your intentions, at the same time stating your circumstances and what settlement you would make upon your future wife; and, on their side, they must state what will be her fortune as near as they can estimate to the best of their knowledge at the time you make the enquiry.”
If this sounds like the preliminary negotiations to a corporate merger rather than the joyous coming together of two lovesick young people, that is because in a society where power, money, and prestige were still often tied to the possession of great estates and a name, an economic transaction is really what it was. A husband often had to have a rich wife in order to keep up the ancestral family name in style. And since her fortune by law became her husband’s property at marriage, the bride’s family had to worry about making sure she and her children had something to live on if her husband died or were a wastrel. Women had a right of dower—or the income from approximately one third of their husbands’ land—when their husbands died, but this was all but abolished by the Dower Act of 1833. Typically, then, the bride’s family would have their lawyers negotiate with the husband’s lawyers to get the husband to agree to guarantee her “pin money,” which was a small personal annual allowance, while he lived, a “jointure,” a hefty chunk of property or money to support her after he died, and “portions” of money for their children. All this would be written up into a “marriage settlement” by the lawyers before anyone walked down any aisles. (One of the final chapters of Oliver Twist, in which the impoverished Henry Maylie proposes to Rose, is headed, in part, “ . . . comprehending a Proposal of Marriage with no Word of Settlement or Pin Money”). In addition, family lawyers set up what was called “separate property” and/or a “separate estate” for brides, especially if they were heiresses. This was basically a trust overseen by the Chancery Court which gave the woman access to all her property and money upon application to a trustee but kept it out of her control so her husband couldn’t “kiss or kick it” out of her, nor his creditors take it to pay his bills. Edgar Linton sends for the attorney Mr. Green to draw up a will creating just such a trust when he finds out about the marriage Heathcliff proposes between Catherine Linton and young Heathcliff, but dies—too late to prevent it.
If an engaged person decided to terminate the engagement he or she faced the possibility of legal action from the former heartthrob. Such a “breach of promise” suit, as Mr. Pickwick learns to his cost in Bardell v. Pickwick, could result in a judgment against the party alleged to have broken off the engagement for a sum equal to any actual damages—such as the cost of a wedding
dress—plus an amount equal to whatever the jury thought adequate to teach the offending party a lesson. In The Eustace Diamonds Lord Fawn at one point worries over the likelihood of such a suit if he breaks off his engagement to Lizzie Eustace. George Osborne tells Dobbin his worries about Joseph Sedley leading Becky Sharp on at the beginning of Vanity Fair: “That’s why I told him to look out, lest she brought an action against him.” At least one contemporary manual of courtship advised its readers not to put anything into a love letter that they would not wish to see appear in a courtroom during a breach of promise suit should the engagement sour.
Assuming you did follow through, however, there were four routes to go. Assuming you were marrying within the Church of England, you could have the banns “published,” that is, ask that the impending wedding be announced three Sundays in a row from the parish pulpit. Any marriage thereafter within three months was valid unless someone spoke out against the proposed marriage during one of the announcements. The advantage of the procedure was that it was cheap: “Banns will do?” Jude Fawley asks Sue Bridehead when they consider marriage. “We shall save a pound or two.” The publicity, of course, was the drawback. Tess Durbeyfield is pleased when Angel Clare tells her of his decision to be married by license rather than banns, having “feared that somebody would stand up and forbid the banns on the ground of her history.” Mistress Yeobright does just this in The Return of the Native. “I forbid the banns,” she says, standing up during the service.
There were other ways to get married. “Marriage by banns is confined to the poorest classes,” sniffed one mid-century etiquette manual, “and a license is generally obtained by those who aspire to the ‘habits of good society.’ ” Ordinarily, for a few pounds you could obtain a license either from a local clergyman or at Doctors’ Commons in London, which would let you get married in a parish where one of the parties had lived for at least fifteen days. Outside of very poor and rural areas, this would have been the usual way to get married for most of the century and it avoided publication of the banns.