Medieval Hunting (22 page)

It is self-evident that the Forest Charters were aimed at preserving and protecting the vert and venison for the king, and also any fortunate men or women who were licensed by the king to hunt in the royal Forests. These laws potentially affected all other persons in England, including members of the nobility and the Church. The Ricardian statute of 1390, the first Game Law to be passed which came under the jurisdiction of the Common Law courts, not the Forest courts (increasingly the Forest eyres), restricted the rights of hunting to those with an income from land of at least 40
s
per year. This effectively excluded the majority of the population, so was socially restrictive. Sir William Blackstone, in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765–9), summed up the situation very succinctly:

Though the forest laws are now mitigated, and by degrees grown entirely obsolete, yet from this root has sprung a
bastard slip
, known by the name of
Game Law
, now arrived to, and wantoning in its highest vigour: both founded upon the same unreasonable notion of permanent property in wild creatures; and both productive of the same tyranny to the Commons: but with this difference; that the forest law established only one mighty hunter throughout the land,
the game laws have raised a little
Nimrod
in every manor
.
¹⁰⁰

After 1340 the Forest eyres met less and less often, so the courts became increasingly ineffective in controlling the sovereign's vert and venison. At the same time, it appears that the licences to impark and the grants of free warren increased. These grants from the Crown extended the exclusive nature of hunting.
¹⁰¹
The Forest Laws further declined into semi-abeyance during the fifteenth century.

However, the new Tudor monarch, Henry VII, was a dedicated and enthusiastic hunter, determined at the outset to redress this decline of royal authority. Politically, he also regarded unrestricted hunting as a likely cover for conspiracies. In consequence, the Game Laws were revived at the outset of the Tudor monarchy. The Game Act of 1485 was the first legislation to make hunting at night or in disguise a felony.
¹⁰²
The mid-Tudor period brought outbreaks of popular unrest and each one resulted in new and more restrictive legislation. The northern Pilgrimage of Grace and other lesser disturbances resulted in the Game Acts of 1539–40, consisting of punishments for new categories of hunting offences, including hunting in disguise or at night in royal parks and Forests, and stealing eggs or fledglings of falcons or hawks from the king's manors. These were enforced under Common Law by the local assizes and quarter sessions. By the early sixteenth century, poaching offences appear more and more often in records for the Court of Star Chamber and the Duchy Court of Lancaster.
¹⁰³
In 1547, Edward VI repealed all of the capital game offences enacted in 1539–40. However, the great destruction of deer parks and game, the result of widespread riots and rebellions in 1549, led to a three-year revival of the capital penalty for those game offences specified in the 1539–40 Game Acts. A further act of 1549–50 was passed to try and counter large-scale deer poaching in the king's parks. These were all made felonious offences. Elizabeth was more practical and realistic than her predecessors, making game offences misdemeanours which were punishable by three months' imprisonment, treble damages caused and seven year sureties for good behaviour.
¹⁰⁴

By the early seventeenth century game legislation and enforcement were vehicles of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege. Even the common lands and wastes, places where commoners secretly hunted, were affected by restrictive legislation and by game preservation schemes, such as enclosures, implemented by the landowners. The Game Laws of later centuries highlight the doctrine of the absolute and unqualified rights of private property,
¹⁰⁵
which embraced the ownership of specified wild animals, including rabbits, on one's own land. These laws became the foundation for the notoriously draconian enactments of Georgian and Victorian England, which together with the harsh Norman Game Laws, appear to have shaped popular public opinion on game legislation. As a matter of interest, Forest Law in the New Forest, neglected and almost forgotten except by Forest freeholders, formally ended in 1964.

In the northern Italian city states during the later Middle Ages game laws were also a feature of hunting. For example, restrictive laws were introduced in Verona, a city controlled by the Republic of Venice, concerning game seasons and the rights of various classes of person to hunt different types of game. By the fifteenth century, the rulers of Milan (the Visconti), Ferrara (the Este) and Mantua (the Gonzaga) had enclosed huge areas as hunting parks from which the commonalty were excluded. These hunting reserves were an important representation of each individual prince's or noble's power, and the grounds and game were accordingly protected and preserved by their feudal authorities. There were stiff fines for trespass and harsher penalties for poaching. In the park at Pavia, for example, night trespassers were fined the huge sum of 50 florins or would have a foot amputated. In the same park there was a sliding scale of fines for poaching game, apparently based upon size, ranging from an immense 100 florins for taking a hart or fallow buck to 2 florins for a quail.
¹⁰⁶
These penalties were intended to be punitive and punished not only the crimes of trespass and poaching but, perhaps more significantly, the act of defying the power and influence of the recently established princes and nobles. Their intention was thus very different to the Game Laws in England where a poacher was punished for his crime of poaching and fined according to his status and ability to pay.

In Saxony at the beginning of the fifteenth century Game Laws still allowed peasants to hunt small game and predators, but this right was removed after 1500 when hunting became the privilege of the ruling classes. This created great bitterness as the peasants could no longer protect their crops, orchards and stock. Restrictions affecting the rural peasantry included limiting the height of fences, prohibiting the use of pointed fence posts to prevent deer injuring themselves, collaring dogs with wooden bars or clubs to prevent them hunting game, and taking away the ancient right of pannage (turning out pigs to pasture, particularly to eat acorns in the autumn) in the Forests. However, villagers were still required by feudal law to provide the labour needed for big hunting days, particularly driving game to the hunters at their stands. These restrictions and obligations fuelled popular discontent and resulted in uprisings such as the Peasants' War of 1524–5.
¹⁰⁷
Such legal restrictions on peasant hunting were politically self-destructive as they denied men not only their personal freedom but also one of their few important sources of protein. An increase in unlawful hunting was an inevitable consequence, in addition to the more serious problems of peasant discontent and rebellion.

The underlying problem was that many people enjoyed poaching. Perhaps the deep-seated instinct and psychological need to hunt, whatever one's station in society, is one of the more valid reasons why poaching was so widespread during the later Middle Ages. Certainly, it appears that in England the problem of illegal hunting was difficult to contain under the system of the Forest courts and required some measure of reform from the late fourteenth century onwards. The infrequent number of prosecutions after 1400 under the 1390 act suggests that this attempt to control poaching by Common Law was also ineffective. Reforms to the Game Laws during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries demonstrate the growing importance of class privilege in establishing a rigid structure of hunting legislation. What is also demonstrated by such ubiquitous and determined illegal hunting over several hundred years is the mistake of equating poaching with class. Sources show clearly that members of all levels of society were involved in illegal hunting; to them their position in society was either of no consequence or, at most, marginal, to the act of poaching. This activity not only crossed social barriers; in some more extreme cases, such as outlawry and poaching gangs, it actually united men from varied backgrounds in another common cause, outwitting the law.

T
he previous chapters have shown the economic and social importance of hunting and hawking in the late medieval European world and how these activities provided sport, exercise, preparation and training for war, social contact, food and subsistence, and also pleasure. Although hunting and falconry were extensively written about in the instructional manuals and treatises and commonly figure in romantic literature, virtually all late medieval contemporary writings ignore the role and practical involvement of women in any form of hunting. There is, however, a disparate and considerable corpus of evidence, particularly in illustrative sources, which indicates that women at all levels of society were involved in hunting in its broadest sense, ranging from deer hunting by aristocratic ladies to food collection by peasant women.

Recent research indicates that women were actively involved in virtually every aspect of medieval life at all social levels, although in many cases only exceptionally. For example, Jeremy Goldberg's work has demonstrated the active participation of women in a wide variety of trades and even guilds in fifteenth-century towns.
¹
Townswomen, hitherto largely unresearched because of a dearth of direct written evidence, achieved roles and status within late medieval urban society which earlier historians had not considered likely or even possible. Compton Reeves points out that women were exempted from that part of the Sumptuary Statute of 1363 ordaining that artisans were to confine themselves to one craft, as women were ‘often engaged in multiple craft labours such as brewing, baking, and spinning as part of their normal activities'.
²
However, no evidence has emerged, as yet, of women being employed at any level as professionals in royal, or noble, hunt establishments. Hopefully future research may produce some examples. In spite of this exception, and given the tidal wave of interest in medieval women and their functions and status, it is surprising that the subject of women and hunting has been neglected by modern researchers and writers.

The general impression gleaned from late medieval art and literature, almost entirely produced and written by men for men, is that high-ranking women were usually limited to the passive function of decorative audience, admiring, applauding and occasionally receiving symbolic parts of the carcass, but only rarely participating in the dangerous and unseemly excitement of the stalk or chase. John Cummins endorses this view when he remarks that ‘for women to take part in the rigours of classic “par force” hunting, as opposed to its social preliminaries and aftermath, must have been a rarity'.
³
This remark is based upon his extensive studies of the illustrations in practical manuals and manuscripts. Illustrations of women as active participators in hunting activities have long been interpreted by most historians as being part of the ‘world upside-down' tradition. There is much persuasive evidence for this viewpoint of female involvement in masculine activities. Veronica Sekules comments ‘Scenes of women hunting are quite common . . . but they do not always document known practice'. She points out that the
Taymouth Hours
is prefaced by the inscription ‘Cy comence jeu de dames' (‘Here begins the sport of ladies') and continues that the pictures may have been intended to be amusing, in the ‘world upside-down' tradition, or to be allegorical, referring to the pursuit of men by women and vice versa.
⁴
Some of the illustrations in
Queen Mary's Psalter
showing women engaged in jousting, fighting and other male occupations are quite probably of figurative and metaphoric, rather than literal, significance. The two damsels tilting with lances but dressed in elegant robes provide a good example of this humorous reversal of roles.
⁵
However, even with what at first sight appears to be the obvious satirisation of women, care in interpretation must be exercised. It is common knowledge that in the case of warfare there were notable exceptions to such generalisations of ‘world upside-down' reading, such as the female warriors Jeanne d'Arc and Jeanne Hachette, as well as several cases of female Orders of Knighthood. The Orden de la Hacha in Catalonia was founded in 1149 by Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, to honour the women of Tortosa who helped defend the town against Moorish attack. The Order of the Glorious Saint Mary was founded by Loderigo d'Andalo, a noble of Bologna, in 1233. There is also evidence of women serving in the established military orders of the Teutonic Knights, Knights Hospitaller and Order of Saint John, providing more than the simple provision of aid, and undertaking other menial and Hospitaller functions.
⁶
These functions may have included some kind of armed role as female warriors.

Like the hare which, as discussed in chapter three, often appears in ‘world upside-down' scenes in marginal pictures, particularly in an opposite role such as the hunter instead of the quarry,
⁷
women seem to have been a favourite target for male satire in medieval manuscript margins and other pictorial sources. Again like hares, women often feature in ‘world upside-down' misericords, having the characteristics of Eve and being represented as rebellious, vain, lustful and gossiping. Misericords frequently present a general picture of domestic strife between the sexes with women depicted as the winners.
⁸
They are also commonly shown indulging in male pursuits such as hunting, jousting and fighting. Hares were also, like women, regarded as ambiguous creatures, characterised by craftiness and foolishness, the ability to appear and disappear mysteriously and having the power of transformation into and from a witch.
⁹
To the medieval male mind, the close connection between women and hares was an established fact and this traditional association is continued by modern hare hunters who always refer to the quarry as ‘she', irrespective of its sex.
¹⁰
Another hunting personification term for the hare is ‘puss', both an informal term for a girl or young woman, and an archaic word probably derived from the Middle Low German
pus
, meaning a hare.
¹¹
The perceived similarities between women and hares in the Middle Ages may be the reason why the hare is perhaps the commonest of animals to figure in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts, although its satirical guise varies from hare-hunter and falconer, to hare-knight, cleric, judge and hare-witch.
¹²
Men, it seems, were preoccupied with the representation of women in forms other than those which they deserved or were entitled to.