The hunting of foxes using horses and hounds takes place over vast tracts of land. As opinion polls [e.g. Guardian 18.12.01 by Mori, 83% think Hunting is either cruel, outdated, unnecessary or unacceptable] have regularly shown that even in country areas the majority are opposed to fox-hunting then ‘how on earth do those taking part get permission to trample over miles and miles of green fields and meadows?’ In some cases, they don’t, and most people will have heard TV or radio reports where a pack of hounds has descended on some poor person’s garden to rip apart the fox in front of the children’s eyes or slaughter the family pet. Many examples of this can be found, but some of the best and most recent can be found in the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS) submission to the Burns inquiry in early 2,000 (they can be found on the Burns inquiry website and obtained directly from the LACS) Also since hunting resumed in December 2001, they just can’t help themselves…

Clearly it is not acceptable to do what you want, even on land you own, everyone can expect some restrictions and the argument is that foxhunting is unacceptable to the majority of people and as such it should be banned. Penalties would then be imposed, both financial and penal, on those who refuse to abide by the rules and regulations consequently adopted.

This is clearly something some supporters of fox hunting find difficult to understand. Hardly surprising really as it means that the two main principles of land management in Britain, established originally by William the Conqueror after the French [i.e. Norman] invasion of 1066, would be broken. These principles are a direct result of his emphasis on hunting, namely, that facilitating the private pleasure of the privileged few was a legitimate basis for determining the allocation of land in Britain. Secondly that the landowner possessed the right to do whatever he liked (& until relatively recently it was a he) with his land irrespective of the impact of his land-use decisions on other members of the community.

In this section we take a look at how these principles became enshrined in practice and why they must be challenged and defeated. So, it’s back to 1066 and William the Conqueror who after defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings went on to impose his rule over much of what we now term ‘England’. William’s passion for hunting meant he set aside huge tracts of his new kingdom as his private playground for the pursuit of deer and boar, in which there were massive restrictions on food production by anyone and everyone else.

Defined in law as Royal Forest these lands extended far beyond the lands that the King owned personally and included territory he had handed out to Freeholders. Some of those owning land even today are descendants of these gifts, almost 1,000 years later. For example, Le Gros Veneur was William the Conqueror’s closest companions and his chief huntsman. He was given estates in Cheshire and the earldom of Chester. The Duke of Westminster, Britain’s richest man, is a descendant as are the Grosvenor family with their vast fortune. Both own land and property. For the linguists out there you should note the similarity between Le ‘Gros veneur’, and the similarity to it of the word ‘Grosvenor’.

Of course, the poor mostly did not know how to read and did not have the time or resources to record their history. Most of Essex, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, large stretches of the north and west and parts of Scotland and Wales were declared Royal Forest. William arranged "his own hunts in the elegant Norman tradition, insisting that the hunters wear elaborate costumes similar to those worn by soldiers going into battle. The Conqueror brought to the hunt in England all the pomp, the pageantry, the discipline, respect for horsemanship, courage and expertise that it still has today. He also introduced the horn." (P. 46. Blackwood,1987)

Lack of records at the time mean it is not possible to establish the exact size of the Royal Forests during William’s reign but it is clear that almost a quarter of England was royal forest during the reign of Henry II in the mid Twelfth century; and that by the thirteenth century, after a period of decline, they still covered about one-fifth of the land surface of England.

"Royal Forest" did not imply only wooded land: it embraced villages and cultivated fields as well as common, rough pasture, field and wood. The term ‘royal forest’ meant an area in which a special kind of laws - the forest law - applied. Rather like the special laws that govern the use of the Royal Parks today e.g. Hyde Park; enforced by special Police, the Royal Parks Police.

The laws and regulation of the royal forest, enforced by a host of forest officials, forbade any activities that might impair the use of the land for hunting, for deer and boar. Nobody, not even the baronial owner of the land, could plough up pasture used by deer in order to grow crops, nor could trees be cut down; permission was required to lop branches... Anybody who broke any of the forest regulations could be fined heavily and might have his property confiscated. The poaching of venison was the most serious offence, and for this a man could be castrated and blinded.... All this to protect stag hunting for the Royals and the rich.

Outside the royal forests, the land-owning classes took their cue from the king, and applied the principles of the royal forest to their own lands. Living as warriors at the expense of the cultivators of the soil, they had time on their hands. Hunting provided something to do, which was not only entertaining but also useful, in that it provided ‘peacetime training for war’. As the knights and barons took up the royal habit of hunting so they followed the king in creating private hunting domains of their own.

To establish a private hunting forest or ‘chase’, a landowner needed only the permission of the king. Once he had secured this, he could forbid everybody else to take animal food within it. The vast private chases of medieval England, of which there were at least 26 at various times in the Middle ages, owned by both lay and ecclesiastical lords, included Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, Lancashire’s Forest of Brownland, Arundel in Sussex, Enfield Chase in Middlesex and Dorset’s Cranborne Chase.

Because of the size of the royal forests and the private chases it was not practical to fence them and ordinary people were permitted to traverse them in order to go about their everyday business. However, in the third category of medieval game preserve - the smaller deer parks - no access of any sort seems to have been permitted.

Deer parks were essentially status symbols in which their owners hunted deer. Securely enclosed with a high earth bank topped by a fence of oak stakes, all maintained by serf labour, the deer park was usually situated close to the Lord’s house and might well occupy potentially productive agricultural land. There is definite evidence for the existence of 1900 parks in England at various times during the Middle Ages, and they must have been a common feature of the landscape. Hundreds of deer parks could have seen their owners only very occasionally since many of the great landowners and wealthy bishops had large numbers of parks: The Bishop of Winchester, for instance, owned 23, The Dukes of Cornwall 29 and the Earls of Lancaster 45. Today (2002) Sir Richard Benyon owns 12,000 acres of Hampshire and Berkshire, with 2 deer parks, not one is accessible by the public. Berkshire as a whole has 39 Parks and you can get in only 5, 7 out of 59 in Hampshire, and in Cheshire it’s little better with 18 parks open out of 48.

Clearly the development of the habit of hunting had a decisive impact on the allocation of land in medieval England... (Better population statistics exist for deer in medieval England than for human beings.) Many are the instances in which the allocation of a stretch of land for private bloodsports (regal or baronial) in medieval times has survived the intervening centuries. For example, the countryside around Alnwick in Northumberland was established as royal forest; foxhunting and pheasant shooting are two of the main uses of the enclosed and essentially private headquarters of the present Duke of Northumberland’s northern lands, the 3,000 acre Hulne Park at Alnwick. Similarly, Cornbury and Wychwood in Oxfordshire was a favourite hunting ground of the medieval kings; today, two of the main uses to which its owner, Lord Rotherwick devotes Cornbury Park and Wychwood forest [at 2,150 acres] are pheasant and deer shooting.

While some of the vast deer preserves of the Norman Landowners were in areas of relatively poor and infertile soils, like the New Forest and Dartmoor, others occupied land that could have grown crops for the poor. Farming was further impaired by deer that strayed from the coverts, and woodland pastures on to growing crops in existing fields. The restrictions on grazing in the royal forest, private chases and deer parks meant that serfs and the few free peasants had to seek pasture for their livestock somewhere else, perhaps some distance away. But this inconvenience and hardship had to be tolerated in the interests of the private pleasure of the rich.

The arrival of feudalism in Britain then, constituted a graphic case of the seizure of power by the strong over the weak. The manorial system had existed in embryo under the Saxon kings, who were themselves fond of hunting. But it was the Norman’s who cemented the inequalities emerging under the Saxon regime into a fixed and enduring system.

However Henry II’s successors during medieval and Tudor times proved less anxious to preserve the royal forest. The sheer size of the forests made it extremely difficult to police as an increasing population sought to use the forest's resources.

Just as importantly the Crown began to realise it could make money in other ways and Henry III began to permit the felling of royal forest timber, the killing of game and the enclosure of tracts of forest. By about 1330, the area of the royal forests in England as a whole had shrunk to about two-thirds of what it had been in 1250. At the same time, there was a reduction in the stringency of the laws application, so that more and more areas became ‘forest’ in name only. The penalties for forest offences were reduced.

There were fewer convictions involving imprisonment and castration and more fines. The grazing rights that the Crown had reserved for itself in the forests came to be less vigorously enforced. As a result of all this, the poor began to take by stealth much of what the law denied to them. They began to drive their cattle into the deer reserves and to take timber freely from the forest. People began to squat in the forests, make clearings for agriculture and exploit all the resources the forest had to offer. The poor reminded themselves that Genesis said the animals were made for man, and poached with passionate determination and courage. For they poached because they were hungry and there were many food shortages.

By an act of 1670 a man had to be Lord of the Manor, or have substantial income from landed property, even to kill a hare on his own land. The basic game qualification was an income of £100 yearly from a freehold estate, which in 1750 was between five and ten times the annual income of a labourer. There is a myth that unlike France where it’s ruling class literally lost it’s head, the English ruling class always knew when discretion was the better part, and the time to retreat had come. We may question this given their ferocious insistence on maintaining at vast cost, decade after decade, a system of game-preservation not only guaranteed to arouse continual resentment, but also to focus political attention on the most vulnerable point in their defences – the concentration of land ownership, and with it parliamentary and juridical power in so few hands. However, perhaps the aristocracy use Fox Hunting as a political barometer for testing whether its’ grip on ideology and hegemony is slipping? If they can defend Fox Hunting they can defend other examples of their excess as well.

Historically the aristocracy and the Royals owned the majority of the land, but with the onset of the industrial revolution the people were further displaced from the land they had left. This was done via enclosures and other criminalization of people’s rights. (not without a bitter fight – see "The London Hanged", Peter Linebaugh, Penguin, 1991) A new elite group came to buy some of the land. "Among whom bankers, brewers and lawyers figured prominently. These groups wanted to own land largely to enhance their social status. So when they arrived in the countryside, the last thing they wanted to do was to adopt attitudes which would be at odds with those of the existing land-owning aristocracy. To gain social acceptance they were more than happy to ape the habits of their betters: they were even prepared to lay on lavish hunt breakfasts, to subscribe munificently to the local foxhounds and to cram their coverts full of pheasants. This process was, of course, but one aspect of the much vaunted readiness of the British elite to absorb the cream of lower classes that presented a potential challenge - the process to which some historians attribute Britain's parvenu landowners of a French-style revolution. In this case it left Britain often more firmly committed to traditional land-owning attitudes than the aristocrats themselves." {p.73 Shoard]

The actual numbers of men who amassed fortunes from the Industrial Revolution and then went on to become major British landowners is, however, small. Only about 6 per cent of all the country seats in Northamptonshire, Herefordshire and Northumberland between 1540 and 1880, for instance, were occupied by people who had bought their way in from business. But many more leading lights of industrial Britain were introduced to the rituals of upper class landowners than actually became landowners themselves. For you did not have to become a landowner to indulge in the landowners, Royal and aristocrats’ most glamorous pursuit - bloodsports.

It was shooting - of pheasants, grouse and deer - that enabled many of the rich men of late nineteenth century Britain to absorb and therefore identify with rural land-owning culture. Rented shooting rights enabled even those who were not in a position to become landowners to see themselves as country gents in spirit, if only on a spare time basis.

The landowners did not deliberately set out to consolidate their positions by forging stronger links with the rest of the Establishment. This development, useful though it was to be to them, occurred largely as an unforeseen product of their efforts to consolidate their position in purely financial terms.

The idea of letting sporting rights to outsiders surfaced early in the nineteenth century. At first the lets were modest: huge areas of Scottish deer forest could be secured for tiny rents because the sport was uncertain and the forests had no facilities like hunting lodges. But it quickly emerged that immense demand existed. By the 1870s, landowners were finding they could rent out deer forests at considerable profits. They needed the money. For by the 1870s, the repeal of the Corn laws and the influx of cheaper food from abroad had cut back the profitability of many types of agriculture.

The game act of 1831 had removed an ancient restriction limiting most forms of hunting and shooting to the owners of land or their eldest sons; from henceforth anybody with the necessary certificate could kill game either on his land or on that of any other person with his permission. So landowners were handed an ideal opportunity to make up the income they were losing from agriculture.

Scottish landowners were particularly quick to exploit the sporting potential of their land. Sheep farming, of which landowners had enjoyed such high hopes when clearing crofters out to make way for sheep-runs, suffered badly in the face of new competition from the refrigerated lamb of New Zealand and Australia. Between the 1860s and 1880s, the rents of Scottish sheep farms were halved. At the same time deer stalking was becoming more and more fashionable. To own stalking was to own the greatest of status symbols - all the more so after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought the Balmoral Estate in 1848 and started to retreat there every August and September. By the 1920s, businessmen were paying £44 in rent payments alone for the privilege of killing one stag, quite apart from the cost incurred in travel and equipment. In many places, sheep were cleared from estates to make way for deer and new hunting lodges were built. By the end of the century a quarter of the entire area of Scotland had been turned over to deer forest. Yet over this vast area, deer stalking employed only 800 men full-time and another 1,000 part-time.

If deer stalking was the most exclusive sport, grouse shooting, pheasant shooting and salmon fishing were also attracting larger and larger numbers of rich non-land-owning devotees. The number of shooters that could be accommodated in any one area was greatly increased by a change in the way the grouse or pheasants were shot. Instead of one or two men pursuing birds on foot and shooting any that their dogs might frighten up into the air, the shooters were lined up and hundreds or even thousands of birds were driven over their heads by beaters.

The profitability of Scottish salmon fishing was transformed when the sport became a craze among rich Englishmen in the 1850s and ‘60s. "Before these years, rivers like the Tweed in the Border Country south of Edinburgh had been fished only by the country folk and a few shoemakers and other artisans. These were all quickly driven out as annual migration of Englishmen pushed rents higher and higher. By 1868, visitors were paying £1 a day for the privilege of fishing (but not taking away any fish they caught). Salmon fishing too had become the exclusive preserve of the rich." [p. 75, Shoard]

Deer hunting then, was the main focus of royal and aristocratic pursuit. Although not exclusively so as the late 19th century royal purchase of the Sandringham estate in Norfolk showed - it has extensive grounds especially cultivated for shooting.

David C. Itzkowitz ("Peculiar Privilege:A Social History of English Foxhunting". Harvester Press, 1977) cites the following:

1. The diminishing number of wild deer except in the most desolate parts of Britain.

2. Until relatively recently [i.e. in the last 200 years] hounds were not able to chase foxes, they had to be specially bred until suitable.

3. A wealthy country gentleman called Hugo Meynell started to develop the hounds and he popularised the 'sport'. He is generally regarded as being the 'father of foxhunting' in its modern form. He started the Quorn hunt, out of Quorndon Hall in North Leicestershire. The old aristocratic hunts remain the most prestigious today as well, Prince Charles has ridden with the Quorn regularly, but not as much as with the most aristocratic hunt of them all - the Beaufort hunt. Prince Charles, Harry and William, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, as well as Camilla Parker Bowles are just a few of the names that ride to hounds in the Gloucestershire region.

4. It also became fashionable - previously foxes had been regarded as vermin - and not protected in any way. One Elizabethan law required the churchwarden to pay a bounty for the head of a fox, which would have encouraged the poor to catch and despatch them by any means necessary... From about the 1780s onwards it was generally recognised that foxhunting attracted the respectable and fashionable, no longer "looked upon simply [as] the sport of ignorant backwoods squires". The Prince of Wales gave it his patronage in 1793, giving up hunting stags in Hampshire.

"By 1797 the "Sporting Magazine" could refer to 'the competition for superiority in taste and neatness, at the commencement of the season' amongst followers of the different fashionable or would-be fashionable packs. From this time on, foxhunting was to have a fashionable and social cachet it was never to lose." (p.12)

5. The 2 great transitions were "for the country gentlemen, was therefore from the hare to the fox, the conversion of harriers into foxhounds. For the aristocrat, it was the desertion of the stag. The Duke of Beaufort, short of deer, found that the fox provided an enjoyable chase for his staghounds". (Carr, P. 25)

The areas of land that foxhunting took place on were enormous "Lord Berkeley's hunt stretched from Bristol to Kensington Gardens, Sir Richard Puleston's from Flintshire to Leicestershire, and Lord Darlington's hunt from Durham to Doncaster. The Dukes of Grafton had a hunting empire covering Surrey, Norfolk and Northamptonshire."(Blackwood, P.50. 1987)

However, whilst there may have been a change in the animal being hunted there was no change in the principles which lay behind it, that firstly the private pleasure of the privileged few was a legitimate basis for determining the allocation of land in Britain and secondly that the landowner possessed the right to do whatever he liked with his land irrespective of the impact of his land-use decisions on other members of the community.

It would, of course, have been suicidal for those involved with foxhunting to try and defend such rights as they go against most of what most people would call ‘legitimate’. So those involved sought to create a mythology [see later for a look at some of the myths] around foxhunting. In doing so they hoped, and it must be said they have largely succeeded, to restrict the debate on foxhunting to issues, which whilst important, are subsidiary to the main ones. Namely, that the rich are using massive areas of land that were stolen from the ordinary people of Britain to pursue their own personal pleasure. Well, we now want that land back – it once belonged to the people of these lands and it should belong to them today so that they can collectively decide what to do with it as they feel free. And it won’t be for foxhunting led by the Duke of Beaufort that’s for sure…

F.M.L. Thompson says at this point

"A sport eminently suited to the mounted and leisured aristocracy and gentry,
foxhunting… the fashionable hunts attracted the entire world of high society.
In the nineteenth century, moreover, it was an increasingly organised activity,
with a growing body of conventions and etiquette, which gave the hunting
community a mystique and cohesion of its own. An expensive activity, the
major part of the expense was frequently carried by a member of the aristocracy,
whose enthusiasm for the chase was in this way the means of cementing his
leadership of all branches of country society". [page 144]

Just briefly, before closing let’s take a look at some of those foxhunting myths, which include:-

The Royal inheritors of William the Conquerors’ attitudes are still involved in hunting. They all involve themselves in hunting in one form or another, whether it is on Horseback (Prince Harry, Charles and William) or shooting like Edward, The Duke of Edinburgh (strange title for a Greek) and the Queen who delights in death like earlier generations of kings and Queens. The present Queen has only been captured on film twice wringing pheasant’s necks. Back in 1845 the Times reported on "Her Majesty [Queen Victoria – editor] at Stowe".

AS fifty beaters advanced, so many that their sticks clashed "a regular running fire was immediately commenced upon the devoted hares… the ground in front of the shooters became strewn with dead and dying; within a semi-circle of about 60 yards from his Royal Highness, the havoc was evidently greatest. The gun was no sooner to his shoulder than the animal was dead."

So much dead animal meat that they were never going to eat or sell, rather like the vast majority of shooting today. Other ‘achievements’ were at Sandringham, where by 1900 the pheasant bag had reached 12,000. 10 years later it was 40,000, King George Vth who succeeded in 1910 was a ‘famous shot’, and bags of 4,000 partridges a day were common, with the King accounting for 1,000.

Princess Anne deliberately went towards the Countryside Alliance stall at the Country landowners Game Fair after the first Countryside Rally (1997) and got her maid to take some things for her. According to Blackwood (1987) the League Against Cruel Sports has found that Charles has hunted with 42 different hunts (P. 32) as often as 4 times a week. Charles also attended the summer 2001 Country Landowners Gamefair…

This year the foxhunting and bourgeois magazine "Country Life" could say in its’ editorial [3.1.02] "We have entered the year of HM the Queen’s Golden jubilee. Ten years ago, when Her Majesty celebrated 40 years on the throne, we published a front cover showing 40 different images of her". The role of hunting like the monarchy then is to form a political and respectable petit bourgeois ideology of business as normal… Like Country Life did on 7.2.02. It published again the full page ‘frontpiece’ portrait photo of the Queen it published to mark her claim on the throne, at the same time an advert for the same magazine carried in the same issue said "The only guide to British culture you’ll ever need. Country Life".

This arrogant essentialist nonsense really does them no favours at all when trying to convince people of the benefits of hunting. Further evidence is the front page of Country Illustrated magazine (Vol. 5, No. 51, March 2002) complete with a picture of the Queen entitled "The Queen, her jubilee, and friends." Also a ‘warning’, "next issue: The Queen and the turf" (p. 68)

Some modern historical evidence is the patronage the Royals give to various ‘countryside’ events and magazines. Princess Anne and Captain Mark Philips attended the 100th anniversary dinner given by Horse and Hound. H & H (April 6th, 1984, p. 7) "Princess Anne Honours Our Centenary Celebrations". "Princess Anne paid a warm tribute to Horse and Hound's 100 years' service to the racing, hunting and equestrian world when she spoke at the dinner held in the City of London on Thursday last week... she spoke at length of the monarchy's connections with racing, hunting and equestrianism".

"I am very pleased to extend warm congratulations to Horse and hound on the completion of their first hundred years of publication... I send you, the staff and readers of Horse and Hound my warm good wishes on this historic anniversary".

Elizabeth R. H & H (p.13)

"best wishes to Horse and Hound for this its Centenary year".

H & H, P 14. Prince Philip

"May Horse and hound continue to flourish in the years ahead".

H & H (P. 15) Elizabeth R Queen Mother.

Just as Prince Philip could comment in his usual sensitive manner that urban people are ignorant. Commenting on the ‘countryside’ march in London in 1998 he wrote that it was "a dramatic expression of the anxiety of country people about the growing influence of the perceptions and attitudes of townspeople on popular opinion… in many cases there are deeply held beliefs, but I suspect that in most cases it is due to ignorance." [Journal of the British Association of Shooting and Conservation, 90^th anniversary number] How the patron of the World Wildlife Fund can then hunt and blast these animals (tigers, birds, foxes, and deer) in the name of conservation is the hardest contradiction for them to convince people of.

"The general public knows little or nothing about polo, and Horse and hound is the only publication in Britain that reports it regularly and fully. It is therefore read by all polo players" H & H (P. 15) Lt.-Col. A.F. Harper, Honorary Secretary, the Hurlingham Polo Club.

Don’t get us started on Polo… that is perhaps for a future campaign… Of historical note to observers of the Labour movement, for every 100 readers who have heard of Peterloo, an accident of history in which 6 people were killed at a single mass meeting in Manchester… probably not more than 1 has heard of Captain Swing, although half the countryside blazed, 2000 were condemned to death and 500 transported to the Antipodes.

Like the Royals, the aristocracy are good at forwarding the image of benevolence, make a show of giving gifts, Christmas dinners to loyal staff and so on, but the fatal flaw was the Game laws which totally lacked the consent of the governed. The image they liked to portray was benevolence, but the reality was malevolence sustaining a blighting and widening mistrust. Few magistrates ever seem to be worried about the sentences they passed down, and time and time again there is evidence of wilful cruelty and vengeance. One Swing letter complained that the rulers "hearts is so hard as the hearts of Pharo", Lord Melbourne in Parliament after the Swing disturbances said that the desperate & half starved labourers acted "from the most pure and unmixed and diabolical feeling of senseless malignity". The class divide was a blatant and living affair in the lives of the people, as Lord Melbourne then brought forward a bill to bring back Spring guns (hidden guns to kill trespassers, wood collectors, & poachers) He said "More good was to be anticipated from the general terror… the passing of the Bill… than from the actual setting of the spring guns themselves".

Many years later little has changed and the Transport and General Workers contribution to the Burns Inquiry immediately pointed out the bias involved by inviting the fake new 'Union of Country Sports Workers' set up by field sport supporters to contribute, rather than the largest representative of agricultural workers, the T &G. This bias has been seen before in previous government inquiries, notably the Scott-Henderson report in 1949 whose committee members were overwhelmingly biased in favour of the Hunting set, 5 of the 7 committee members were either directly involved with bloodsports or were part of its’ periphery. The Burns Inquiry wasn't quite as biased in the first instance although there were demonstrable links, but it was obvious to groups like the National Anti-Hunt campaign that it wasn't worth their while giving it the gloss of respectability and refused to participate.

On the Game laws and hunting the charges against the ruling class are that they were based on a low and vile hypocrisy, sustained by heartlessness, callousness and the inability to feel for their fellow man. As early as 1833 Edward Bulwer Lytton in his book "England and the English" said that if there was a ruling class which possessed the means to ‘remedy the evils existing among the poorer population’ it was the English landed order of the 19^th century with its’ great wealth and authority… Bulwer concluded like William Cobbett twenty years before him and Gladstone 50 years after him, that with a few exceptions ‘they didn’t want to know’. Both Peel, who introduced the Police, and Disraeli (men from other worlds yet attached to the aristocratic idea) made great attempts to lead them away from their narrow self-absorption, but largely failed. Indeed Lady Shelley points out that they sometimes took ‘great offence’ at Peels patient efforts. Their astonishing obdurate resistance, decade after decade, to almost every attempt to ameliorate the suffering and hardship that arose from the Game Laws since it might threaten their Game Privilege of hunting, was not exceptional, it was symptomatic and pathological.

Examples of this hunting arrogance today is that of Lord Kimball [has been in charge of all the Countryside Alliances campaigning in the Houses of Parliament] and his wife who unfairly sacked a worker from their country mansion. The sacked worker (Mrs Fletcher) said "Lady Kimball would antagonise me for weeks by being sarcastic and rude and changing her mind at the last minute about jobs that had previously been agreed.. she would even belittle her husband in front of staff and dinner guests… she was a woman who was used to getting her own way. She was always pleased with herself when she spoke to people in a derogatory fashion". ("Peers sacked houselady claims she was bullied: Haughty Lady treated me like a servant" by Martin Stote, Daily Express, 1.12.01, page 26)

Also "Working for Britain's richest man was hell.. we were even told how to fold his loo paper" by Alan Rimmer, Sunday Mirror, 24.2.02, page 11, where it says

Our suggested programme is

1. A Right to roam and repossession of the land.
2. Stop organised Foxhunting with hounds, either with concerted political action or direct intervention on a local basis, normally with other local hunt saboteurs.
3. The right to hunt the rich.

Though not in every case today, certainly poaching was part of the means of survival and resistance to money and landed power that made the laws into the 20^th century. Howard Newby calls this

"for the agricultural worker poaching often took on the countenance of an
undercover guerrilla class warfare". (Page 46, 1979)

The parting shot is the popular song that rattled around the country prior to the 1911 Parliament act which finally killed off the Lords inherent right to make laws in the first instance, also known as the Poachers Anthem.

"the Land! The Land! T’was God that made the land
the Land! The Land! The ground on which we stand
Why should we be beggars with ballots in our hands?
God gave the Land to the people!"

Most copies of Horse and Hound, Shooting Times, Country Life, Countryside illustrated, Hunting, Shooting Gazette, The Field, Countrymans Weekly magazines and websites over the last 5 years…

"Hunting Year Book: With Diary and Hunt Maps 2000-2001", London:St. Martins Magazines plc. 2000.

Baily's Cambridge, "Baily's Hunting Directory 2000-2001", Pearson Pub. Ltd, 2000.

Sir W. Beach Thomas, "Hunting England: A Survey of the Sport, and of its Chief Grounds", London: Batsford ltd, 1936.

Caroline Blackwood. "In the Pink". Bloomsbury. 1987.

Roger Scruton. "Animal Rights and Wrongs". Metro Books. 2,000.

Roger Scruton. "On Hunting". Yellow Jersey Press. 1999.

"Baily's Hunting Companion", Edited by Barry White-Spunner, Cambridge: Baily's, 1994.

F.M.L. Thompson, "English Landed Society: in the Nineteenth Century", London: Routledge, 1963.

Janet George. "A Rural Uprising: The Battle to Save Hunting with Hounds". J.A. Allen. 1999.

B.L. Krearley, "Let's go Hunting", London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1950.

R.N. Rose. "The Field 1853-1953". Michael Joseph. 1953.

A. Henry Higginson, "Two Centuries of Foxhunting", London: Collins, 1946

E.W.Bovill, "English Country Life", London: OUP, 1962.

Charles Chenevix Trench, "The Poacher and the Squire", london:Longmans, 1967.

Howl, Wildlife Guardian,

Howard Newby, "Green and Pleasant Land? Social change in rural England", London: Wildwood House, 1979.

Davina Cooper, "For the Sake of the Deer: land, local government and the hunt", The Sociological review, Vol 45 no 4, Nov 1997.

"Thugs, Wreckers and Bullies: The Truth about Hunt Violence", Hunt Saboteurs Association,1998.

"Public Order, Private Armies: The Use of hunt security - a report" Hunt Saboteurs Association,1998.

Hobsbawm and Rude, "Captain Swing",

Douglas Sutherland, "the Landowners", Anthony Blond, 1969.

Marion Shoard. "This Land is Our Land". Gaia Books. 1997.

Alun Howkins, Chapter 15 "Economic Crime and Class Law: Poaching and the Game Laws, 1840-1880" in "The Imposition of law" eds S.B. Burman & B.E. Harrell-Bond, London: Academic Press, 1979.

David C. Itzkowitz, "Peculiar Privilege:A Social History of English Foxhunting". Harvester Press, 1977

P.B. Munsche, "The English Game Laws 1671-1831", London:Cambridge university Press, 1981.

Pamela Horn, "Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside", Stroud:Sutton pub. Ltd, 1976.

Harry Hopkins. "The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars In Britain 1760-1914." Papermac. 1986.

For those of you who want the best introduction to the history and meaning of hunting, the Game laws, and poaching for the poor are directed to the last two books in the list. ‘The Long affray’ and ‘Albions Fatal Tree’ are totally absorbing and brilliant reads, though there is also a wealth of good material in Marion Shoard. Apart from the range of pro-hunting authors mentioned, Roger Scruton should be shot on sight…