For many country gentlemen hunting was not so much a favourite pastime as a way of life; and so it remained for generations to come as it had been for generations past. When R. S. Surtees, the sporting novelist who came from an old Durham family, described Lord Scamperdale in Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour he was writing towards the middle of the nineteenth century but the character he delineated might well have stepped out of the pages of Henry Fielding and would have been as recognizable to Fielding’s grandfather as to his grandson. Scamperdale was ‘a coarse, broad, large-built sort of man’ with clothes to correspond who, so far as he could manage it, did not spend ‘a halfpenny upon anything but hunting’. He was ‘stumpy and clumsy and ugly, with as little to say for himself as could well be conceived … a square, bull-headed looking-man, with hard, dry, round, matter-of-fact features that never looked young and yet somehow never got old’. He lived in a fine, stone Italianate house which, surrounded by a park of 800 acres, had been built at enormous cost by a forebear who had pulled down the original brick Elizabethan mansion. But, wishing to preserve the equally fine contents in good condition ‘against he got married’, he had the house ‘put away in brown holland, the carpets rolled up, the pictures covered, the statues shrouded in muslin, the cabinets of curiosities locked, the plate secured, the china closeted’. And he lived in a small sitting-room, whose bookshelves contained, in addition to only two books, a grand quantity of old spurs, knots of whipcord, piles of halfpennies, gun charges, hunting horns and similar miscellaneous articles, mainly of a sporting character.1
In Scamperdale’s day hunting usually meant fox-hunting. Yet, even though the enclosure of so much waste land and the destruction of so many forests had led to a severe decline in the number of herds of wild deer, stag-hunting maintained its popularity for many years after the superiority of fox-hunting had been recognized in the north and spread gradually to the south. Even after she grew too fat to ride, Queen Anne drove after the hounds in Windsor Forest which she had restocked with deer. She drove at a furious pace, ‘like Jehu’, Jonathan Swift told Esther Johnson, the ‘Stella’ of his Journal. She sat in a narrow, one-seated carriage with extraordinarily high wheels which carried her rattling through cornfields and across the most formidable obstacles. The taking of the quarry was celebrated by a loud blowing on a great number of horns and a knife was presented to the highest-ranking man present who cut off the animal’s head. Queen Anne’s young son, the Duke of Gloucester, who was to die shortly after his eleventh birthday, was given his ‘baptism of blood’ when he was six from hands dipped into the carcass of a deer that had been brought into the yard and killed for this specific purpose.2
Horses were used mercilessly. Runs of eighty miles and more were not uncommon; and at the end of one run, which lasted for six hours and in which George III took part, the stag dropped down dead before the hounds. Not twenty out of 150 horses were in at the death; several had died in the field; and tired ones were seen limping away to every village.3
By George Ill’s day, however, deer were more often seen as ornamental animals in a gentleman’s park than as quarry to be chased and slaughtered. Hare-hunting continued to be popular well into the nineteenth century, and there were packs of harriers in every county; yet fox-hunting was gradually gaining ground. Horses began to be bred for speed as much as for endurance; and they were also now bred for jumping, even though the more prudent riders would often dismount and lead their mounts over or around obstacles. The Belvoir, Quorn, Pytchley and Cottesmore hunts were all founded in the 1770s. Many ladies hunted as enthusiastically as men, though others only dutifully. George Ill’s daughters went out with their father, all wearing ‘blue habits faced and turned up with red, white beaver hats and black feathers’; and the Vicar of Wakefield’s entire family ‘on fine days rode a-hunting’.4
While hawking and the netting and liming of birds were all still practised, the development of the sporting gun had made shooting them more popular. The matchlock with a barrel five feet long or more had taken the place of the much shorter-barrelled flintlock; and while this was far from a reliable, not to mention far from safe, weapon – and while reloading was still a slow operation – it did make it less difficult to shoot birds on the wing. Indeed, a skilful shot like Thomas Coke of Holkham was said to have killed no less than eighty partridges with less than a hundred shots, though those less experienced, having to aim so far in front of a flying bird, were more likely to miss it than not.5 Double-barrelled guns had been invented, but were generally considered unsatisfactory and, by some, unsportsmanlike.6
Fishing, like shooting, required much skill, since most rods were homemade, consisting of two or three straightened and seasoned twigs spliced together, and with lines made of horse-hair. But all the methods known to the modern angler were practised; and numerous new editions of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler had appeared since its first publication in 1653.7
Fish, like game, was still stolen in large quantities by poachers, despite the number of laws passed to protect the interests of the owners, particularly the great landowners. An Act of 1671 had actually restricted the right to take game, even on a man’s own land, to those with estates worth more than £100 a year. And in 1723 an Act known as the Waltham Black Act introduced some fifty new capital offences, from deer stealing at night to breaking down the heads of fishponds, from cutting down trees ‘planted in any avenue, or growing in any garden, orchard or plantation’, to robbing ‘any warren or place where conies or hares are usually kept’. This Act took its name from Waltham Chase in Hampshire where men with blackened faces had been causing violent disturbances similar to those that had occurred in the 100,000 acres of Windsor Forest. According to a proclamation issued in February that year ‘great numbers of disorderly and ill-designing persons’ had associated themselves under the name of Blacks and, armed and disguised, had broken into forests and parks, killed and carried off deer, rescued offenders from the constables, sent menacing letters to gentlemen demanding both venison and money, and threatened to burn down houses, farm-buildings and haystacks. They had shot at people in their homes, ‘maimed their horses and cattle, broke down their gates, and cut down avenues, plantations, and heads of fishponds, and robbed them of the fish’.8 The Act which these crimes provoked has been described by Sir Leon Radzinowicz as constituting ‘in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code’,9 and by E. P. Thompson as ‘an astonishing example of legislative overkill’, though Pat Rogers has suggested that the Blacks belonged to the ‘criminal subcultures of Georgian England, that their behaviour was a real danger to peaceable men’ and that the Black Act had ‘a justification at this time.’10
Despite the severity of the Black Act, however, it seems that the Game Laws were not in general enforced very strictly until the middle of the eighteenth century. Thereafter, though, as they began to use guns, poachers were punished with far less leniency.11 An Act of 1770 made would-be nocturnal poachers liable to six months’ imprisonment; another Act of 1803 rendered them liable to hanging if they were armed and resisted arrest; and in 1816, a man, even unarmed, might be transported if caught with a net. By 1827 one seventh of all convicted criminals were poachers.12 William Taplin, author of Observations of the Present State of The Game in England, said that he had never been into a farmhouse which did not contain an illegally acquired hare or a few brace of birds and that the London market was regularly supplied with hares by poachers who risked man-traps, leg-breakers and spring guns to keep in business.
Similarly, smugglers regularly supplied the market with huge quantities of lace, tobacco, wine, spirits and tea, so much tea, in fact, that dealers in it petitioned Parliament in 1736, maintaining that half the amount consumed in England had come into the country illicitly. Smuggling was carried on not only extensively but also with great skill and cunning. Lace was stuffed into geese and hams; tobacco was made into ropes, becoming scarcely distinguishable from ships’ gear; brandy kegs were concealed in lobster pots and packing-c
ases marked ‘returned Government stores’. The landsmen who carried off the contraband once it had been unloaded from the ships were as expert in their way as the sailors, while the gangs who undertook to fight off coastguards were as ready to mutilate or murder an exciseman as an informer. In 1748 an informer, Daniel Chater, and an exciseman, William Galley, were murdered together:
They began with poor Galley, cut off his nose and privities, broke every joint of him and after several hours’ torture dispatched him. Chater they carried to a dry well, hung him by the middle to a cross beam in it, leaving him to perish with hunger and pain; but when they came, several days after, and heard him groan, they cut the rope, let him drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and stones to cover him. The person who gave this information, however known to the magistrates, was in disguise lest he should meet the like fate.13
Such atrocities caused only temporary revulsion. Smuggling was not considered a serious crime; and smugglers were regarded as romantic adventurers performing a useful service of which all sensible people availed themselves. Sir Robert Walpole, the king’s principal minister, used an Admiralty barge to bring his smuggled wine up the Thames and was thought none the worse for that. Lesser men would have done the same; and, whenever they could get it, they did not hesitate to buy and drink contraband brandy, a keg of which was once left at the door of a house in the Isle of Wight where Elizabeth Sewell, the writer, once stayed with her uncle. It was a token of gratitude from the smugglers who crossed and recrossed the grounds of the house without interference.14 A tap on a window or door late at night at the Rev. James Woodforde’s parsonage in Norfolk usually heralded the arrival of the local smuggler. ‘Andrews the smuggler brought me this night about 11 o’clock a bagg of Hyson Tea 6 Pd weight,’ Woodforde recorded in his diary on 29 March 1777. ‘He frightened us a little by whistling under the Parlour Window just as we were going to bed. I gave him some Geneva and paid him for the tea at 10/6 per Pd … 3.3.0.’15
The traffic was far too extensive for the few customs officers and revenue cutters to control it; and such excisemen as there were were often corrupt or incompetent. The entire crew of the revenue cutter, the Rose, were dismissed in 1825; and at Looe a chief customs officer was convicted of collusion as both his immediate predecessors had been. Tom Paine, author of the Rights of Man, who had once served aboard a privateer, was dismissed from his appointment as a supernumerary officer in the excise for passing traders’ returns without examining their stocks and, having been taken back into the service, was dismissed again for going off without leave. He was also suspected of having dealt in smuggled tobacco. When smuggling did begin to decline after the end of the Napoleonic Wars the reason was not so much that the preventive system had improved as that the previously high customs duties had been so much reduced that the crime was far less profitable.16
34 Pastimes and Pleasures
Anxious though they were to keep their men hard at work during the time of wakes and fairs and other traditional holidays, most masters found it as difficult as Josiah Wedgwood did to prevent them wandering off to enjoy themselves whenever they could. There were few districts in England without their regular feast days or wakes, few places where a fair was not held at least once a year or where a local custom such as the bull-running at Stamford in Lincolnshire, the pancake race at Olney in Buckinghamshire, or the presentation of the Dunmow Flitch did not draw large crowds.
English people, so foreign observers thought, loved crowds and noise and bustle. They seemed to spend little time indoors, flocking together, enjoying each other’s company in a rowdy, joking way. In London they walked in their hundreds in the parks and in the pleasure gardens of which there were over sixty in addition to Ranelagh and Vauxhall. A German visitor thought the medley of people in St James’s Park ‘astonishing’, while a Frenchman described the crowds at Vauxhall as the largest he had ever seen gathered together in one place. At Vauxhall, or the New Spring Garden as it was called until 1785, admission was originally free. An entrance fee of a shilling was introduced in the 1730s, but even so 12,000 people gathered here for a rehearsal of Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ in 1749. At Ranelagh in Chelsea, where the charge for admittance was 2s 6d ‘tea and coffee included’ – 5s on firework nights – the grounds were equally packed. The rotunda – into which ‘everybody that loves eating, drinking staring or crowding’ was admitted for a shilling – was often so full that the orchestra could only just be heard above the din. At Hampstead Wells all kinds of people from fashionable ladies to Fleet Street sempstresses, from attorneys to chimney-sweeps, came to dance and to listen to the music, to promenade up and down Well Walk and to bowl and gamble on the Heath.1
In colder weather men pushed their way into taverns and coffee-houses. Those who could afford the prices went to James Wyatt’s Pantheon in Oxford Street, the ‘winter Ranelagh’, where the opening ceremony in 1772 was attended by 1500 people, and where masquerades, fêtes, ridottos and concerts thereafter attracted patrons in even greater numbers. Or they went to Carlisle House in Soho Square where the Viennese opera singer and courtesan Theresa Cornelys ran assembly rooms which, when Fanny Burney was taken to them in 1770, were ‘so crowded’ there was ‘scarce room to breathe’. Or they set out for Almack’s Assembly Rooms in King Street, St James’s, where a voucher of admission to the weekly ball was ‘the seventh heaven of the fashionable world’ and where all the gentlemen had to wear knee breeches and white cravats, even the Duke of Wellington being refused admission because he was wearing trousers. And for those who could not find the money for assembly rooms there were ‘cock and hen clubs’, where men and women met to sing songs; ‘cutter clubs’ for apprentices who enjoyed themselves on the river and in riverside taverns; and political and debating clubs like that known as the House of Lords whose meetings, attended by the ‘more dissolute sort of barristers, attorneys and tradesmen’, were held at the Three Herrings in Bell Yard.
There were puppet shows, freak shows and waxworks, shooting galleries and football matches, brothels and chop-houses, taverns with skittle-alleys and bowling-courts, bear baitings, cockfights and prize-fights, fights between men and fights between women; and there were the marvellous continuing fairs, Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield, Mayfair which gave its name to the West End’s fashionable quarter, and Southwark Fair originally lasting for three days but eventually for two weeks.2
Hogarth’s Southwark Fair depicts some of the best-known performers and booth proprietors of his day, including Miller, the German Giant; Violante, the acrobat; a conjuror; a slack rope walker; a waxworks exhibitor; a troupe of players; a fortune-teller; a player of the bagpipes; a Savoyard music-grinder; a fire-eating quack; a performing dog; and James Figg, the famous pugilist, whose head was covered with black patches concealing his scars and at whose academy young gentlemen were trained to defend themselves against the attacks of footpads.3
At most fairs all over the country there was a ring where pugilists displayed their skills and accepted bets from amateurs who fancied their chances in battling against them. ‘Anything that looks like a fight,’ the Frenchman Henri Misson suggested, was ‘delicious to an Englishman’. Jack Broughton who became champion of England in 1740 – and who was abandoned by his patron, the Duke of Cumberland, when he lost a fight upon which Cumberland had bet £10,000 – introduced his pupils to boxing gloves to ‘secure them from the inconveniency of black eyes, broken jaws and bloody noses’. But gloves were not generally worn and fights were then crude and bloody, often made more so by the spectators who would join in a match which was not going the way their bets lay and jump into the ring to kick or punch one or other of the antagonists. For this reason, towards the end of the century the rings were raised on stages six feet or so above the ground.4 It was on such a stage at Stilton in Huntingdonshire that the Jewish pugilist, Daniel Mendoza, fought ‘the gentleman boxer’, Richard Humphreys, in a fight which lasted for forty minutes before Humphreys collapsed and which was continued, after his
recovery, for a further ten minutes before he lost consciousness again. A subsequent fight between them, which was maintained over seventy-two rounds, lasted for an hour and thirteen minutes.5 Such lengthy fights were not uncommon; nor were fights between women which were regularly staged in London at Stoke’s Amphitheatre in Islington Road.
César de Saussure gave an account of a contest between two women which was preceded by ‘a fight with wicker staves by a few rogues. They do not spare each other, but are very skilful in giving great whacks on the head. When blood oozes from one of the contestants a few coins are thrown to the victor. These games pass the time till all the spectators have arrived’.
Both women [de Saussure wrote] were very scantily clothed, and wore little bodices and very short petticoats of white linen. One of these amazons was a stout Irishwoman, strong and lithe to look at, the other was a small Englishwoman, full of fire and very agile. The first was decked with blue ribbons on the head, waist, and right arm; the second wore red ribbons. Their weapons were a sort of two-handed sword, three or three and a half feet in length; the guard was covered, and the blade was about three inches wide and not sharp – only about half a foot of it was, but then that part cut like a razor. The spectators made numerous bets, and some peers who were there some very large wagers. On either side of the two amazons a man stood by, holding a long staff, ready to separate them should blood flow. After a time the combat became very animated, and was conducted with force and vigour with the broad side of the weapons. The Irishwoman presently received a great cut across her forehead, and that put a stop to the first part of the combat. The Englishwoman’s backers threw her shillings and half-crowns and applauded her. During this time the wounded woman’s forehead was sewn up, this being done on stage; a plaster was applied to it, and she drank a good big glass of spirits to revive her courage, and the fight began again, each combatant holding a dagger in her left hand to ward off the blows. The Irishwoman was wounded a second time, and her adversary again received coins and plaudits from her admirers. The wound was sewn up, and for the third time the battle recommenced … The poor Irishwoman was destined to be the loser, for she received a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat. The surgeon sewed it up, but she was too badly hurt to fight any more, and it was time, for the combatants were dripping with perspiration, and the Irishwoman also with blood. A few coins were thrown to her to console her, but the victor made a good day’s work out of the combat.
The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only) Page 48