Medieval Hunting (18 page)

The evidence, although scattered and sometimes of an indirect or ambiguous nature, indicates that the commonalty were hunting to a considerable extent. The methods they employed were usually markedly different from those of gentle hunters, although there were areas which overlapped, such as netting and trapping larger game. Quarry type differed too; the emphasis in commonalty hunting had to be on smaller game, particularly small birds; in other words, animals and birds which were not regarded by the ruling élites as worthy of hunting, or ‘chaseable'. Again, there was some overlap, particularly in the cases of predators and vermin. Clearly, commonalty hunting methods lacked the ceremonial and ritualistic aspects associated with aristocratic hunting. This is largely because obtaining fresh meat and protecting crops were the main objectives, rather than impressing one's peers and superiors and deliberately creating an event which highlighted the social exclusiveness of the ruling classes. In addition, unlike
par force
or bow and stabley hunting, commonalty hunting usually only involved a handful of people out to acquire extra food. Procedures were thus irrelevant, unnecessary and time-consuming. However, it is worth noting that there were certain basic procedures in dealing with a carcass which were ritualistically performed by gentle hunters but to common hunters were simply the best ways of slitting, skinning, cleaning and butchering. Common hunting also differed in regard to numbers of participants from the large numbers involved in the aristocratic chase. Lone hunting was possibly the most widely followed commonalty method as it required little preparation, caused the least amount of disturbance and could be very effective. The same factors apply to hunting in small groups, with the added advantage of cooperation between individuals perhaps producing a bigger bag. These latter remarks apply equally to illegal hunting, discussed in the second half of the next chapter.

One of the very few paintings specifically featuring peasant hunting is
The Hunters in the Snow
, signed and dated 1565, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
¹⁰¹
This is one of five remaining paintings from a sequence of probably twelve (perhaps six, one for every two months) large-format pictures, the idea based upon the labours of the months found in the Calendars of Books of Hours but actually illustrating the seasons.
The Hunters in the Snow
represents January and incidentally illustrates one of the severest winters of the Middle Ages. The dejected hunters, accompanied by a variety of equally downcast hounds, are returning to their village from a hunt which was not for sport but for necessity. Their meagre bag, slung on the back of a hunter, is a scrawny fox. A detail at the left margin of the picture is the inn sign, which in Old Dutch reads ‘Dit is In den Hert', meaning ‘This is in the heart'.
¹⁰²
The painted figures of the sign are of a saint with a golden halo kneeling in front of a red deer stag. Bruegel intended the whole sign to be read as a pun. The saint is undoubtedly St Hubert, the Germanic patron saint of hunting, who had a vision of Christ on the cross, which miraculously appeared between the antlers of a stag he had hunted and forced to stand at bay. He had offended Christ by hunting on Good Friday, the day of the Crucifixion. (The same story applies to St Eustace, but in Italy; this was discussed in a previous chapter.) Hubert was immediately converted to Christianity, thus becoming pure ‘in his heart'. The chaseable stag is also correctly termed a ‘hart' or ‘hert', and represents Christ. The inn sign can also be read as an icon of irony, the stag highlighting the legal inaccessibility of the hart and its venison, and the inedibility of the only quarry killed by the hunters, a fox. In addition, the inn sign hangs by only one hook, a symbol which can be read in two ways. Perhaps, as Penelope Le Fanu Hughes points out, it may be a comment on humanity's lack of spirituality.
¹⁰³
Karel Van Mander comments that Bruegel and his merchant friend Hans Franckert liked to disguise themselves as peasants and attend rustic feasts in order better to observe country people.
¹⁰⁴
It is possible that Bruegel has developed an empathy for these rural people and their hard way of life. The inn sign may reflect this empathy and be a pointed social comment by Bruegel, that St Hubert was the patron saint of aristocratic hunters who cared little for peasant hunters and their success. Finally, the picture is one of great contrasts: the dejection of the hunters returning from the hunt, a complex occupation which is especially problematic in the winter, with the simple pleasures of the skaters on the ice in the village below, enjoying a rare opportunity for leisure provided by the harsh winter.

Gaston Fébus makes it perfectly clear that the lower orders in the village communities of south-west France were actively engaged in hunting when he remarks ‘Assez en ay dit, quar c'est chasce de vileins et de communs et de paysanz'.
¹⁰⁵
Febus's writings in
Livre de chasse
often demonstrate an essential human quality, perhaps rare in a late medieval aristocrat. His empathic style gives us the distinct impression that he realised the necessities and enjoyment of hunting to common men, and probably would have viewed with regret any curtailment of their traditional pleasures.
¹⁰⁶
Emperor Maximilian I also appreciated the hardy peasants' pleasure and expertise in hunting, and one of his own joys, when hunting in the mountains of the Tyrol, was that he could be approached by the humblest of his subjects.
¹⁰⁷
No doubt many a hunting anecdote, and more, was exchanged during these meetings. It seems that hunters, whether peasant or prince, have always been able to communicate on some level as they have so much in common to talk about. This is not idle chitchat or mere gossip. In hunter-gatherer societies today, like that of the Inuit, discourse involves the oral passing on of up-to-date hunting news, such as recent sightings of game, game movements, other hunters, poaching and so forth. It often includes useful reports on the hunting environment, such as flooding, freezing and weather predictions. These unplanned meetings and conversations helped provide a useful basis for hunting trips then, and still do, particularly where remoteness and the environment make normal communications difficult. Also it cannot be denied, hunters love talking about hunting. There is no peasant equivalent of the aristocratic medieval literary texts praising the varied joys of hunting, so talking, tale-telling and singing of hunting provided the peasant equivalent of a literary tradition. Human nature being what it is, it is fairly safe to assume that peasants, and other humble hunters too, took pride in their skills and pleasure in their outings. Written or pictorial material is not needed to demonstrate these natural human emotions; their unrecorded pleasure can safely remain as taken for granted.

T
he three previous chapters have been concerned largely with comparisons, stressing the differences between upper- and lower-class hunting, emphasising in particular quarry type, methods and techniques. These differences highlight the barriers of class division, a continually reiterated subject which is dear to the hearts of many historians. However, it is apparent, perhaps surprising, that the uniting factor between all classes was a love of hunting. This common ground provided the base for organised hunting on a large scale and was vital to the successful running of a royal or noble hunt establishment.

This organisation resembled a pyramid in its hierarchical structure and it recruited men and youths from a wide social background. The sons of yeomen, and lesser men, shared a common culture with aristocrats and gentlemen when they joined such an establishment. It was a way for the non-gentleman, and his son, to rise up the social scale. Distinctions of class increasingly became blurred and there was confusion over the meaning and validity of gentility.
¹
By Tudor times, their dress, weaponry (which included swords), speech and manners gave them the appearance of gentlemen.
²
Some of this could be said to be a necessary part of their training as hunt servants within the noble household, but some was also the result of concern with their own image in the hunting field, a direct reflection of their master's wealth and prestige. Of course, their masters were also responsible as they held the purse strings which financed such finery. However, some commentators were critical of yeomen imitating their social betters, exemplified by the comment in
Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden
of a ‘yeman arraieth hym as a squyer'.
³
Certainly, in pictorial sources of Renaissance hunting, such as
Les Chasses de Maximilien
, it is often difficult to differentiate between gentle and professional hunters. This is not the case in earlier illustrations, such as those of
Roy Modus
and
Livre de chasse
, in which the hunt staff are much easier to identify. Compared to the gentle hunters, the servants are purposely painted smaller, even those in the foreground; more simply dressed and often in green; carry hunting knives and horns slung on baldrics but not swords; and as most are on foot, lack spurs. Not only are the gentle hunters larger, they are also depicted as more elegant and stylish than the staff on whom the artist has skilfully bestowed a humble demeanour. There are few hunt servants portrayed in the Calendar cycle of MS Egerton 1146; they are only present in April (Netting Red Deer), July (Despatching the Hart), August (The Ceremony of the Curée) and December (The Boar-hunt on Horseback with Hounds).
⁴
However, their inferior rank is evident from their dress which is not only plain but ragged. The fewterer in April sports grey leggings lacking knees. The weary lymerer in July is shown wearing boots which have split from their soles, revealing his bare feet. The August lymerer wears a ragged blue tunic and he, too, has holey boots. The servants wear hunting knives but lack swords and spurs. In addition, their facial expressions are, to a man, glum and gloomy, a complete contrast to their master who is clearly having a tremendously enjoyable time. It appears likely that in this particular German manuscript, the artist is under strict instruction from his patron to portray the hunt servants as clearly identifiable and inferior beings. Why else depict them in rags? An alternative answer is that this
was
the reality, and the neatly dressed hunt servants in
Livre de chasse
and other illustrated hunting treatises was the conventional though sanitised version, more in keeping with the dignity of the proud owner of an expensive illuminated manuscript. Perhaps the patron of the Egerton manuscript was unusual in that he was determined to record every actuality of hunting in his lands.

The royal Forests in England, the large areas of varied habitat preserved for the pleasure of deer hunting by the king and his guests, were similarly staffed and organised in a strict hierarchical manner. Some such structure was obviously necessary in order to produce some guarantee of sport. It has already been remarked that there must have been close links between the hunt and Forest establishments, particularly leading up to, and on, royal hunting days, although we have little direct evidence of this liaison. It is evident that the hunt and Forest establishments were unusual late medieval organisations in that they both possessed a defined ‘career structure' up which it was possible, with merit and ability, to ascend and achieve high rank. That this was possible, and in two areas of considerable employment, points to a significant flexibility within the feudal system now widely taken for granted by historians. Social mobility, it seems, was perhaps easier in rural England than was previously imagined, particularly after the Pestilence of 1348. These were employment areas into which the higher classes of rural commons, described in the fifteenth-century documents as the
mediocres
, were moving increasingly in order to ‘better' themselves. It appears that the opportunities were there and that the sons of husbandmen entered such employment for social and economic reasons.

Certainly, many of the professional hunt officials, the ‘hunt servants' as they would be called today, stemmed from humble origins, yet they appeared to mix with their employers and social superiors at particular carefully delineated moments because of their specialised training, knowledge and skills. A.C. Spearing remarks that the knowledge of doing everything correctly ‘is a prerogative of the aristocracy and their skilled servants', and that the aristocracy were assisted by ‘lerned servants'. These servants thus spoke and understood the élitist but technical vocabulary of venery which formed the ‘liturgy' of the aristocratic ‘sacrament', although they were ‘lerned' not by birth but by training,
⁵
a fine point of social distinction. However, all had to be taught the correct language and procedures ‘whatever you be grete or litel'.
⁶
This training included the proper undoing of the carcass which, although within the practical knowledge of a noble hunter, was often performed in the English hunting field by a professional hunter or forester.
The Master of Game
makes this clear when instructing his audience ‘it is a point that belongeth to woodmanscraft, though it be well suiting to an hunter to be able to do it'.
⁷
Upon the thorough training of the hunt officials and their assistants depended the success or otherwise of hunting days and, ultimately, of the hunt establishment of each royal Forest and great lord.

The responsibility of the more senior hunt officials was sizeable and the bond of respect between a keen hunting monarch and his older huntsmen could be considerable. Similarly, the falconer who directly supervised the daily running of a noble or royal mews probably had a special relationship with his employer.
⁸
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen valued his falconers highly because of their qualities and skills, and, perhaps significantly, he does not refer to their lineage and birth.
⁹
He regarded the office of falconer as important ‘because its duties are manifold and exacting and call for rare qualities of body and mind'.
¹⁰
A surviving fragment of a register covering a few months of the years 1239 to 1340 mentions by name fifty of Frederick's falconers, including Master Walter Anglicus and his famous son, William
¹¹
(the surname indicates that these falconers were probably of English origin), showing that these officials were regarded as of some importance by the Emperor. The post of Lord Falconer was a high office in many royal households, and even the royal falconers of lower status were sometimes from the landed gentry.
¹²
Those gentle hunters, or employees of lords' mews, who trained and flew birds of prey were divided into two distinct types, based upon the category of bird which they used to take quarry. The
austringer
, from the French
autour
, trained and flew goshawks, or short-winged hawks, in wooded and close country where his bird pursued the prey. In contrast, the
falconer
flew long-winged hawks (falcons), usually the peregrine falcon, in open terrain where his bird could gain great height before ‘stooping' on to the quarry.
¹³
The trainer of a sparrowhawk, an unpredictable bird often carried by aristocratic ladies, was correctly called a
sparviter
.
¹⁴