The latest contribution to the growing literature on the relationship between hunting and its landscapes addresses the transition from deer hunting to foxhunting from 1600 to 1850. A well-written and researched study in a nicely produced format, this book focuses on Northamptonshire. The choice of region means that much of the landscape has a familiar feel from the volumes of the Victoria County Histories and the more recent publications on Rockingham Forest and the region's champion fields. The author has, however, delved into the archives and brings new documentary evidence to bear, particularly on the involvement of the crown and its successors in the administration of the forests to facilitate hunting over the early modern and modern periods. The author argues that the forest appears to have survived largely intact over the eighteenth century and continued to provide suitable habitat for deer, thus questioning the common assumption that the move to the fox was a response to the scarcity of deer. The forest looms large in the latter sections of the book on foxhunting and at times it feels rather as if the study is constrained rather than liberated by the focus, in contrast to the mobile nature of hunting itself.

The account of foxhunting revisits debates about the relationship between the rate and extent of enclosure and Meynallian foxhunting. There is a useful but short chapter on ‘Old Hunting in New Conditions’, which contrasts the last vestiges of deer hunting with foxhunting in the Northamptonshire forests, before the author sets out her argument about the cause of the decisive shift in hunting preferences: the horse. New breeds of horse, a new concern for their training, and a thirst for ‘hard riding’ amongst the fashionable young set, propelled foxhunting from an ignoble alternative to a national obsession. De Belin argues the case well and draws in the closely related sport of horse racing and the increase in publications related to horsemanship and equine breeding. The complex web of human-animal relationships, played out over radically changing landscapes and an equally unsettled social geography, are the context for the debate about the historic role of hunting. Arguably, we do a disservice to the complexity of the past by focusing on foxhunting or on a transition from deer to fox. Most hunting, at least before the late eighteenth century, was pluralistic in its aims, and many more hunted the hare and fox rather than the deer or fox. Furthermore, interests differed and developed. As de Belin points out, those who were to be found thrill-seeking in the shires of the early nineteenth century, were a very different constituency to those who rode to watch the skill of the hounds. But this account does not afford the relationship with the hounds the same emphasis as that with the horse. That said, the study offers an interesting insight into the wider landscape of Northamptonshire and its long engagement with hunting, and the stress on the importance of horsemanship is a useful step forward.