Abstract
There is no doubt that between 1671 and 1831 the landed classes wished to derive maximum benefit from forests, commons and their own estates. Like crops and timber, game animals might be regarded as merely so much plenty to be harvested. It has thus seemed highly unlikely to previous surveyors of this field that a conservationist sensibility might be found among landowners or fanciers of field sports. But the seeking of recreational pleasure as well as profit from the land has a long, if neglected, history, and the perpetuation of field sports could be said to have countered the drive for agricultural improvement in some respects. Pursuing the ‘Countrey Contentments’ of hunting, coursing and shooting, landlords produced a landscape less single-mindedly devoted to intensive agricultural production than it would otherwise have been. Preserving deer, foxes, hares, pheasants and their habitats was a form of conservation, of environmental management not devoted to maximum extraction. Hunting a country, in all its scents and stinks, its blood and other effluvia, meant taking an interest in and intervening in the ecological balance of a piece of country on behalf of what would today be called its leisure amenities. And what were the pleasures of hunting, precisely? Might they not have included a knowledge of and sensitivity to local topography, flora and fauna, even an obsession with their preservation, that modern conservationists would approve of, if not envy?
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My love of the country’s abidin’,
And Nature I’m always salutin’,
For when I’m not shootin’ or ridin’
I’m huntin’ or fishin’ or shootin’.
Charles, Viscount Harkaway, in A.P. Herbert, Tantivy Towers: A Light Opera in Three Acts (1931)
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Notes
Shared agrarian culture gave literate laborers an opportunity to become published poets. See Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
and John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Joan Thirsk, ‘The Farming Regions of England’, in Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 1–112; this passage p. 2. See also her discussion of ‘Enclosing and Engrossing’, pp. 200–55.
‘By 1800 England was one of the least wooded of all north European nations. Despite this, or probably because of it, English enthusiasm for trees and woodland seems never to have been higher’; Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 43–82; this passage pp. 43–4.
See also Tim Fulford, ‘Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees’, The John Clare Society Journal 14 (July 1995): 47–59.
Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 8. Overton disputes Eric Kerridge’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century agricultural revolution, claiming that the most important growth in productivity occurred after 1750, when the most ‘dramatic and unprecedented improvements in output, land productivity and labour productivity’ allowed the population ‘to exceed the barrier of 5.5 million people for the first time’, pp. 198, 206.
Jonson, ‘Penshurst’, in Poems, Ian Donaldson, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
For some of the imperial dimensions of developments in botany, see David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, eds, Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 157.
Douglas Gordon, Dartmoor in All its Moods (London: John Murray, 1931), p. 23.
A. Henry Higginson, Peter Beckford Esquire, Sportsman, Traveller, Man of Letters: A Biography (London: Collins, 1937), pp. 16–24, 37–9.
Macdonald, ibid., p. 125, cites J. David Henry, Red Fox: The Catlike Canine (Washington, D. C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), for the ‘bookkeeping’ function; see Henry, p. 120. Macdonald discusses fox odors in more technical terms in his chapter on ‘The carnivores: order Carnivora’, in Richard E. Brown and David W. Macdonald, eds, Social Odours in Mammals, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 2: 619–722. The following summary draws on Macdonald’s account in both.
Patten, ‘Fox Coverts for the Squirearchy: The Chase and the English Landscape II’, Country Life 40: 3876 (23 September 1971): 736–8; this passage p. 738.
See also John Patten, ‘How the Deer Parks Began: The Chase and the English Landscape I’, Country Life 40: 3875 (16 September 1971): 660–2.
Harry Hopkins, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars 1760–1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), p. 70;
Anthony Vandervell and Charles Coles, Game & the English Landscape: The Influence of the Chase on Sporting Art and Scenery (London: Debrett’s Peerage Ltd., 1980), pp. 41–5.
Delabere P. Blaine, Esq., An Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports or Complete Account (Historical, Practical, and Descriptive) of Hunting, Shooting, Fishing, Racing, &c., &c., 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1880), 2: 856.
Williamson, Polite Landscapes, p. 138. See Forsyth, ‘Game Preserves and Fences’, Journal of the Horticultural Society 1 (1846), p. 201.
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). Land, and Writing about Land. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_3
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