Medieval Hunting (4 page)

Hunting had another immediate practical use in that it provided fresh meat, especially at times when there was no other to be had. Owing to the lack of winter feed, much domestic stock was probably slaughtered in the autumn and the meat salted down for use during the cold season,
²⁸
although this long-held theory is now in dispute. No doubt by the spring, salted meat tasted foul and fresh game held attractions for both legitimate hunters and poachers alike.

Much of the need for fresh meat was supplied by venison, the flesh of deer. In this respect, the most important species was the largest and heaviest, the red deer. As regards numbers and commercial significance fallow deer were secondary, although they became increasingly important during the period as red deer stocks declined. The smallest species, the roe deer, was very much less prized, common though they were in English Forests and parks.
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Deer were required in large quantities, particularly during the lean months of winter and in late summer when they were in prime condition with plenty of fat. This constant demand for venison is clearly shown in
The Master of Game
which relates that Edward II moved his huntsmen with their packs of hounds around the country in order to obtain fat venison. For example, on 27 July 1313, John Lovel, Master of the King's Buckhounds, was sent to various specified Forests and chases in Wiltshire, Southampton and Berkshire to take a total of 24 harts (male red deer over six years) and 54 bucks (male fallow deer). On the same day, William de Balliolo, Master (probably) of the Greyhounds, and Robert Lesquier, Master of Harriers, were despatched to various Forests and chases in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Huntingdon, Northampton and Essex to take a total of 34 harts, 58 bucks and 40 hinds (female red deer). On the 14 and 15 July 1315, orders were given by the king for 322 harts, 302 bucks and 24 does (female fallow deer) to be taken in thirty-three Forests, parks and chases in the kingdom.
³⁰

The quantity of game required by the king appears phenomenal. Hunting a single hart for sport on horseback, using a pack of hounds, could take all day and although ‘sporting', only produced one carcass. Other methods had to be employed and the most effective was driving several, or sometimes many, deer at a time into fixed nets, thus producing large quantities of much-needed protein. A miniature in the Calendar of MS Egerton 1146, an early sixteenth-century German Book of Hours, shows a mounted noble engaged in such an activity.
³¹
However, this type of hunting was not regarded as ‘sport' by the nobility but rather as food collection, an occupation for the trained professionals working in the great hunting establishments of the king and his premier magnates. Gaston Fébus considered the use of nets unsporting, but includes a chapter and illustrations on their manufacture and application in his treatise.
³²
He is at pains to make clear to his audience the vast difference between gentlemanly sport, with its lack of necessity, and the mere provision of meat, a point reiterated by Edward of York:

Men take them with hounds, with greyhounds and with nets and with cords, and with other harness, with pits and with shot and with other gins and with strength, as I shall say hereafter. But in England they are not slain except with hounds or with shot or with strength of running hounds.
³³

Their point is clear: red deer are taken in specific accepted sporting ways; other methods exist but do not personally concern the noble or gentle hunter. Anne Rooney's research shows that Middle English literature concentrates upon the courtliness of hunting rather than the obvious element of the chase ‘This is what marks it as a noble sport, rather than the simple and ignominious pursuit of animals for food or fur'.
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For the upper classes, methodology and courtly practice were inextricably connected and dictated the functions of sport and provision of fresh meat, particularly venison.

The dates of the royal orders to obtain venison are interesting in that they point to the high value of fresh fat venison, even in the summer months when agricultural food production should have been approaching its maximum. Venison clearly formed an important part of the high-protein diet of the ruling classes. Significantly, it also represented status, wealth, power and privilege; the common people did not eat venison as they were not allowed to take deer. Presents of venison to relatives, friends and acquaintances were customary and well received. Such gifts were sometimes recorded in household accounts or letters, as in the Stonor letters of 1480 which twice mention gifts of fallow buck meat from their parks.
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Newly made gentlemen were thus imitating the traditional generosity of their social betters. Framlingham was a large park of fallow deer belonging to the Duke of Norfolk. The 1515–19 game-roll of Richard Chambyr, the keeper or parker, shows the duke's largesse as regards his gifts of venison (buck and doe meat) to his aristocratic friends and neighbours, churchmen and their institutions, the local parson (as tithe), and even nearby towns and villages.
³⁶
As Lord Treasurer, the Marquess of Winchester was entitled to a ‘fee-buck of the season' from the Great Park of Nonsuch Palace. In 1556 he generously gave this privilege to the Company of Grocers.
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These town worthies no doubt used their expertise to produce a splendid annual venison feast for the guild members, presumably including the Marquess.

The fat of game is termed
grease
in the hunting books whether the animal was hunted for sport or to replenish the larder, and this word was a familiar one in even the highest of household economies. The fat of red and fallow deer was usually referred to as
suet
, occasionally as
tallow
, whereas that of the roe buck was termed
bevy-grease
and the fat of other beasts grease.
³⁸
In
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Bertilak summons Gawain and ‘Shewes him the schyre grece schorne upon rybbes'
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of probably red, or possibly fallow, deer. The anonymous author of
The Tretyse off Huntyng
, calls the white or silvery fat of the hare ‘argent',
⁴⁰
and William Twiti, Huntsman to Edward II, comments in
The Art of Hunting
that the hare is ‘þe most merveylous beste þat is in þis lond. . . . For as miche as he beriþe grese and crotyth and rongith.'
⁴¹
Twiti further explains ‘And the tyme of grece begynneth alle way atte the fest of the Natiuyte of Saynt John Baptist [24 June]'.
⁴²
However, Twiti may have been referring to the ‘time of grace', meaning the ‘fence month'. Summer was the season of good grazing during which both game and livestock accumulated a layer of fat, but in England June was also traditionally the fence month for red deer when the hinds dropped their calves and the herds of deer were left undisturbed by hunting or any other interference.
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This period was the English medieval equivalent of a close season and is discussed in more detail in chapter three.

Hawking was very much an upper-class sport, largely because of the huge cost of birds and equipment, and the inordinate amount of time necessary to train the falcon or hawk. However, falconers were providers of fresh meat for the aristocratic table, although on a small scale. In the days before effective guns were invented, the only real alternative to trapping avian prey, apart from a lucky bow-shot, was to fly falcons and hawks at game birds and other edible birds. The peregrine falcon was the preferred bird of prey for nobles. The female peregrine or falcon was favoured over the male or tiercel by aristocratic falconers because of her greater size and fierceness; she would take cock and hen pheasant, partridge, wild duck of all species, wild geese and bustard, as well as large sporting prey such as herons and cranes which, surprisingly to modern palates, were also deemed edible.
⁴⁴
The Parlement of the Thre Ages
describes various types of falcon taking mallard and herons:

Laners and lanerettis lighten to thes endes, Metyn with the maulerdes and many doun striken; Fawkons pay founden freely to lighte, With hoo and hawghe to the heron pay hitten hym full ofte, Buffetyn hym, betyn hym, and brynges hym to sege, And saylen hym full serely and sesyn hym there-aftire.
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The bigger falcons would take hares as well as the larger quarry birds while the smaller hunting birds were mostly used for partridge. The tiny merlin was particularly useful against rising larks,
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larks' tongues being a delicacy much in demand by the upper classes and more prosperous and sophisticated townsfolk. Obviously, the quantities provided by hawking were insignificant compared to those furnished by any form of deer hunting with hounds, by driving deer towards hunters waiting at stations or by driving deer into fixed nets. However, the results of a successful hawking foray ended up on the high table and provided a much appreciated tasty supplement to any feast.

So far the importance of hunting for food, particularly deer, has been discussed primarily in relation to the upper and educated classes. The rest of society probably did not have much opportunity to eat venison, unless it had been poached. However, it must be emphasised that in the short term, acquiring fresh meat of any variety was probably more important to the peasants than to the aristocracy who had access to other sources of meat. The methods used by the common folk had to be far more catholic, and ranged from trapping wild boar to liming sticks on branches to catch songbirds and netting sparrows. Supplementing and varying the basic diet of vegetables and bread was the function of these practical forms of hunting; nor did peasants limit themselves to catching small animals and birds. In
Livre de chasse
, Gaston Fébus is one of the few authors to include a number of commonalty hunting methods such as how to trap a wild boar. He tells how a wild boar raided a farmer's orchard and was trapped in a pit, the entrance to which had been concealed with brushwood. As John Cummins comments ‘When one thinks that many a peasant spent much of the year fattening a domestic pig in preparation for winter, an autumn windfall such as this in one's orchard was probably as welcome as the apples themselves.'
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Gaston Fébus also relates that French peasants used various trapping techniques to guard their stock and crops against wolves, bears and other beasts.
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At the other end of the quarry scale, peasants caught small birds such as thrushes, sparrows, finches and songbirds, using nets, nooses, decoys and bird-lime. These scraps of protein were taken not only for their food value but also because, unless kept down in numbers, they seriously damaged crops and stores. The main quarry species of professional wildfowlers were wild duck and geese, but they took songbirds too, selling them in the towns as food.
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Any type of fresh protein was welcome and, with the exception of foxes and wolves, just about every animal and bird was considered edible.

Rabbits, usually referred to in the medieval texts as conies, a term derived from the Latin
coningus
,
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were in a category of their own for several reasons. They are praised in Proverbs where they are included in the ‘four things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding wise' and then specifically ‘The conies are but a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks'.
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Conies were introduced to the British Isles by the Normans and for several centuries total numbers remained small. They did not do well in the damp British climate and were not natural burrowers. However, both their meat and fur were highly marketable and so conies were husbanded in artificial burrows or warrens, areas of land preserved for the domestic or commercial rearing of game, rather than allowed to breed in the wild and be hunted. These medieval warrens represented almost the sole source of rabbits in England and it was not until the eighteenth century that the animals spread successfully in the wild, notably in the easily excavated sandy soils of East Anglia.
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Rabbits were regarded with contempt by true or gentle hunters as they were hunted for their fur, not for sport.
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The Duke of York remarks ‘Of conyges speke I not for no man hunteth far hem but zit be bisshunters . . .' meaning fur-hunters belonging to the commonalty.
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He is, of course, quoting Fébus who was familiar with the animal as his vast lands lay in southern France, the natural habitat of the rabbit. However, landowners were eager enough to be granted rights of warren and husbanded conies because of the considerable revenue which their meat and fur generated. Not surprisingly, the element of hunting snobbery was not seen to be at odds with the opportunity to profit from farming these small creatures. Not only is the status of rabbit hunters in question, so is their gender, and
Queen Mary's Psalter
shows peasant women taking rabbits at an artificial warren using ferrets and nets.
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Although rabbits were thus unusual as a quarry species in medieval England, doubtless some escaped and bred in small numbers in the wild. Presumably these feral bunnies were poached and hunted by common hunters, and thus changed their status from a husbanded to a hunted species.

An ancillary function of hunting for meat was the production of raw materials for the processing industries supplying domestic and commercial markets. Furs, hides, skins, antlers, horns, teeth and bones were all used in huge quantities for a wide range of products. Hides were made into leather by two distinct processes, tanning and tawing (tawers produced white leather).
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The most valuable fur, with royal and noble status, was ermine, produced from the winter pelage of the stoat. The stoat's tail retains its black tip and when used on robes, these were arranged at regular intervals. Hence, the heraldic description of the fur Ermine is black spots, which can be of various patterns, set on a white ground.
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Following close behind in status was lettice, made from the white winter coat of the weasel.
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Both these furs were used for whole robes and trimming robes, and under the various sumptuary laws were restricted to royalty and the nobility. Even knights and ladies with annual incomes of between 400 marks (£266 13
s
4
d
) and £1,000 were forbidden to wear ermine and lettice.
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Rabbit fur was much sought after by the lower classes, especially in the fifteenth century as prosperity increased in the towns and ports.
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The white belly-fur from conies resembled the higher status ermine and was used as an imitation trimming by socially ambitious people wanting to make the ‘right' impression. Non-specific white fur was known as miniver and was also in much demand. Under the 1363 statute, the womenfolk of esquires with an income of over 200 marks (£133 6
s
8
d
) could wear ‘fur turned up of miniver, without ermine or lettice'.
⁶¹
Vair
is another heraldic fur and was red squirrel skin, said to be the fur from which Cinderella's slippers were made, mistranslated as
verre
, meaning ‘glass'.
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Wolves provided valuable warm fur, used especially for hoods, capes and cloaks, and wolfskins were also processed by tawers. Between 1394 and 1396 the monks of Whitby were paid 10
s
9
d
‘for tawing 14 wolf skins'.
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Fox pelts were much sought after too, but
The Master of Game
cautions ‘The foxes' skins be wonderfully warm to make cuffs and furs, but they stink evermore if they are not well tawed'.
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The 1363 statute allowed the wives and daughters of craftsmen and yeomen to wear the furs of fox, lamb, cat or coney.
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Badgers were trapped not only for food (smoked ‘badger ham' long remained a country delicacy) but also for their hide which provided poor men with the most durable material for footwear.
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Imported beaver fur was used to make hats for the wealthy in the later Middle Ages, but the late twelfth-century writer Giraldus Cambrensis mentions that beavers were still to be found on the River Teifi in Wales and on an unnamed river in Scotland.
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Deer of all three species furnished a great variety of useful raw materials. Deerskin was soft yet tough, ideal material for many types of clothing, including the so-called ‘buff' coats favoured by soldiers and hunters.
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The hide of a deer was valuable, even from a rotting carcass; thus, the skin of a ‘putrid' hind found in Sherwood Forest was valued by the Forest court in 1334 at 2
s
.
⁶⁹
According to Forest Law, tawers were forbidden to live within the Forest ‘for they are the common dressers of skins of stolen deer'. If apprehended, they were removed and had to pay a fine at the Forest eyre.
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