In 1916, Foakes Jackson devoted one of his Lowell Lectures on ‘Social Life in England, 1750–1850’ to ‘Sport and Rural England’. He thought it impossible to understand English life without including the topic, although he feared his Boston audience would think it flippant. O. R. McGregor commented in his introduction to the 1961 edition of Ernle's English Farming Past and Present that no apology was needed, because ‘this aspect of country life has never been woven into the fabric of agricultural history’.Footnote ¹

Environmental history, under which the history of rural sports may be subsumed, was once written by biologists with little sense of historical problems or recognition of the human impress. It was historical ecology, nature with man subordinated, if not left out. It is now commonly written by professional historians, but not necessarily ones familiar with natural history. It is ecological history with some of the ecology left out. Thus the ‘two cultures’ problem persists, since only rare individuals display much interest in both biology and history.Footnote ² The purpose should surely be to construct ecologically-plausible generalisations relating to matters of historical significance. My particular aims here are: first, to discuss the environmental effects of blood sports under the headings of landscape, wildlife and agriculture; second to note the links between a still relatively obscure subject and major historical debates; and third to mention a few ecological concepts and points of method that are not made explicit in writings by historians.Footnote ³

What follows is a synoptic account that does not engage in heaping Ossa upon Pelion by way of intensive documentation, much less original sources. For many purposes, indicative references are all that are needed. After all, if the secondary literature does not sum up primary sources or report observations what use can it be, other than in purely theoretical works? The position taken here is that proper method requires only the minimum documentation needed to make a case, as was repeatedly canvassed by the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian, Robert Fogel, and is the bibliographic equivalent of Ockham's Razor. The alternative would be an approach along the lines of the German Historical School, in which an unattainable descriptive completeness is an end in itself and the recording of everything supposedly permits the conclusions to pop out unaided.

Another matter to be disposed of early is that of terminology: should the term be field sports, used by adherents and temporisers, or blood sports, used by adversaries and the candid? It does not seem particularly ideological to employ the latter term.Footnote ⁴ There can be no denying the spilling of blood in pastimes like fox-hunting, shooting, coursing and even fishing; their histories sit within the category of all those sports (many now banned) which intrinsically involve harm to animals; and it is merely confusing to give the impression of assimilating them to field and track events. Other possible terms like rural or country sports seem bland and obfuscating. By contrast ‘blood sports’ has the merit of frankness and of facing up to the issue of cruelty, which (judging by the vehemence of their denials) even proponents have long recognised as needing to be raised.Footnote ⁵

The innumerable histories of sport written by practitioners commonly read like the annals of train-spotting, being internalist and unanalytical. Fishing is a good example. Its voluminous sagas and hagiographies concentrate on a very few selected species and endlessly recount petty but vitriolic disputes about types of fly or methods of casting. The literature of angling is taken up with fly-fishing to the virtual exclusion of all else.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, the environmental historian of Europe, Richard Hoffman, complains that English writing on the subject is of poor quality, equates fishing with sport angling, and tends to be insular.Footnote ⁷

During the last fifteen years or so, rural historians have been providing more rounded descriptions of the several histories of countryside sports in general.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless many concentrate on the social aspects. Where shooting and the Game Laws are concerned, they have always understandably dwelt on the anti-social aspects. Furthermore the topic remains little integrated with farming history and often seems remote from the ecosystems in which the activities took place, as well as from experience of practising the sports.Footnote ⁹ Richard Hoyle, who has edited a wide treatment of the subject, criticises Volume VII of the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1850–1914 for thoroughly neglecting the topic.Footnote ¹⁰

Landowning classes have typically engaged in pastimes that depend on the use and abuse of animals, these activities being readily available to them. Presumably in some cases they were originally inspired by the needs of the pot and in others by pest control. In England the activities turned into a fetish, from ‘Butcher’ Hawker shooting his way through the wildlife of Hampshire, Trevelyan donning a pheasant mask when dinner was served, or the archetypal case of the Marquess of Ripon.Footnote ¹¹ The Marquess shot over half a million head of game between 1867 and 1923, including 241,000 pheasants. He was given to rolling in the cart of dead game and finally dropped dead on the grouse moor after shooting his fifty-second bird of the day.Footnote ¹² The intensity of sporting concerns was outstanding. Looking around the vast surviving stables and kennel blocks on eighteenth- and nineteenth century estates, and contrasting them with the workers’ cottages, is sufficient to indicate the priorities among the English. Differences among nations in this respect had much to do with the size of the elite, the extent to which it was land-based, the distribution of wealth within it and how much non-landed income was available to it and to the would-be imitators of landed society.Footnote ¹³

The pleasure of the kill, and cruelty to animals in general, or perhaps it should be the replication of these things, has been traced to the detachment of English medieval and urban groups from the countryside and their increasingly instrumental attitude towards animals.Footnote ¹⁴ That did not necessarily oblige the merchant class to go out of its way to join in hunting, shooting and fishing, and cannot fully explain the craze for blood sports. The fashion undoubtedly owed more to a desire to emulate the pastimes, join the networks and share in the prestige accruing to land owners. London money, deposited in landed estates, significantly raised the level of investment in the facilities and practice of blood sports.

Insofar as there were ends other than fashion and pleasure, they were male social bonding and business dealing.Footnote ¹⁵ The railways started an early phase of the extension of sport for these purposes, which were part and parcel of the swelling of commerce within an agrarian society that in the case of England was not violently overthrown by the urban sector. The urban bourgeoisie assimilated to it instead, and made use of it. Men who lived some way apart and were members of similar, but not the same, schools, colleges or regiments could then mingle on neutral grounds. Successive improvements in transportation have merely widened the relevant circles, with car travel from railway stations being a noteworthy addition that brought more and more territory within reach of the London weekend or day out. Without the addition of the social function, ‘it is quite beyond the reach of imagination’, as Veblen commented about this aspect of conspicuous waste, ‘that any adult male citizen would of his own motion go in for the elaborate futilities of British shooting’.Footnote ¹⁶ Dead and mutilated birds and animals are secondary to the deeper function of blood sports, they are largely collateral damage. The bag is sold when there is a market but dumped or bulldozed in when there is not. This is not new. After mentioning that his grandfather neglected farming for hunting, coursing and shooting, William Payn refers to two hundred hares left in heap after a shoot in 1933 because it did not pay to sell them.Footnote ¹⁷

There was nothing to constrain the well-to-do from such behaviour, nor from parallel obsessions like amassing huge collections of birds’ eggs or cases of stuffed birds and butterflies. The suggestion has been made that collecting hobbies indicate a touch of Asperger's Syndrome, while one study indicts authoritarian personality types.Footnote ¹⁸ Certainly there was an intensely competitive display and recording of game bags, with Hawker accused of including his wife's bag as his own. Groups excluded from the land looked on enviously. Tenant farmers were particularly bitter before the Ground Game Act of 1880 entitled them to shoot rabbits and hares, although not winged game, on the land they rented.Footnote ¹⁹ The conditions existed for blood sports to have a profound impact on rural society, the landscape, ecosystems and agriculture.

Landscape effects

Clearly, blood sports had an impact on the landscape, although this was neither unilinear nor cumulative over time, because living features are subject to decay and need constant renewal. ‘Whitethorn and blackthorn and hazel are not immortal,’ Pell pointed out long ago.Footnote ²⁰ Unfortunately the authors who brought landscape history into prominence in the 1950s had no interest in ecology and relatively little in the husbandry side of agriculture.Footnote ²¹ The ‘making of the English landscape’ approach then introduced implies cumulative change because it emphasises the palimpsest formed by ancient survivals.Footnote ²² In reality we cannot directly perceive all former modifications to the landscape and the physical relicts may distract us from powerful but more transient biological aspects. Plant cover may seem to reflect earlier uses but may have altered over time.Footnote ²³ Continual efforts were needed to maintain many types of land improvement. In short, there is cycle as well as trend in land-making, which is important to bear in mind for a balanced environmental history.

A further difficulty is that any summary of the effects of blood sports on the landscape risks three types of homogenisation: the lumping together of sports with different characteristics; treating all periods of agriculture as if they had equivalent consequences; and treating dissimilar regions as if they were the same. In the case of the different sports, their relative economic importance varied greatly, with shooting as the most significant. According to figures in The Tatler for 1911, eight times more capital was invested in shooting than in angling and the annual expenditure was fifteen times greater.Footnote ²⁴ In addition, as Jonathan Finch says, fox-hunting altered the landscape much less than shooting.Footnote ²⁵

By the late nineteenth century, pheasant rearing and the shooting of driven birds were on industrial scales. The density of gamekeepers per acre had risen four- or five-fold during the century and was still rising when the First World War cut off its growth. The Age of the Pheasant – so old keepers lamented – was when game-keeping turned into poultry keeping.Footnote ²⁶ The practitioners of shooting had detached themselves from deep involvement in the countryside, which for many had become little more than a painted backcloth. As Emma Griffin remarks, a man shooting driven birds, ‘did not need to read the landscape in the way that generations before him had done.’Footnote ²⁷ Variations in price regimes also influenced sporting practice. In 1812 a group of Staffordshire landowners patriotically agreed to kill off all game and vermin on their land because of the grain consumed, while the Kent Gazette published an advertisement inviting ‘qualified gentlemen’ to shoot at will on the manor of Denne, in the parishes of Chilham and Molash near Canterbury, because of the harm done to farm output by the great numbers of hares, pheasants and rabbits.Footnote ²⁸ But wartime was exceptional. Ordinarily sport continued almost routinely, with changing price levels making a difference at the margin. Thus Sydney Smith claimed in 1824 that, ‘corn is very cheap – therefore poultry is plentiful, therefore foxes are very strong, and therefore Sport is very good.’Footnote ²⁹

Estate expenditure fell during the arable depressions of the early and late nineteenth century, and between the wars of the twentieth century, but this was not necessarily to the disadvantage of the sporting man. Enclosures were temporarily abandoned on the Oxfordshire Cotswolds after the Napoleonic Wars and fox-hunters could once more ride freely. A century later arable farmers who had weathered the late nineteenth-century depression were prospering again and a few could afford to hunt, although John Orr presciently suggested in 1916 that they ought rather to be saving against the next shock, which arrived in 1922.Footnote ³⁰

Sport varied regionally, too. Sporting regions were not as fixed as may appear, nor arranged quite as the weight of the literature suggests. Thus it was around the northern industrial towns, not in the shires, that game preservation and the number of gamekeepers was densest until the mid-1870s, when poaching became so serious that shooting estates moved to the high moors, which were explicitly advertised by estate agents as thinly populated.Footnote ³¹ From that period, nevertheless, London capital and the demand for sporting outlets meant large investments in the entire metropolitan hinterland, indicated by a rise of eighty-five per cent in the number of gamekeepers in Hampshire between 1871 and 1911 and even steeper increases in the Eastern counties.

The size of partridge and pheasant bags soared when beaters were hired to drive the birds over guns positioned at fixed stands. Earlier in Victorian times shooting had been a matter of walking up the birds, affording the pleasure of the chase, for which the pleasure of the kill was now substituted. Somewhat later, the leading centres of pheasant shooting tended to move south and west, after it was learned on the Welsh Borders that high birds driven over hillside woods offered the best sport. Against that the flat counties of East Anglia, better for partridge, worked hard to compete.

Fox-hunting did bring some landscape changes with artificial earths and alterations to make hedgerows easier to jump, and there were efforts to re-model estates to offer good hunting alongside good shooting. But the predatory nature of the fox means that it is not readily compatible with gamebirds. Gamekeepers had to be ordered, or specially paid, to preserve foxes at the expense of the number of pheasants they could show at a shoot. Tenants who had leased hunting boxes for the season were encouraged by hunting landowners to rent the shooting as well, in the hope of excluding the keener game preservers who might permit their keepers to kill foxes.Footnote ³²

Pheasants prefer the ecotone, that is to say wood edges, for nesting and roosting, juxtaposed with open country for feeding. Many surviving woods were planted in Victorian times to accommodate them. The resultant long belts of trees are especially common on the chalk and limestone. These strips of woodland are narrow, no broader than wide shelter belts. Their typical species is beech, which has little under-storey, so that there is little floristic gain. On the periphery of Salisbury Plain some of them run for as many as four miles. Elsewhere, however, woods planted as fox coverts harbour plants otherwise banished from cultivated areas.

Within the larger, more compact blocks of woodland long, straight rides were cut, which Rackham supposes to be post-medieval and to have come about because of the switch from nets to sporting guns.Footnote ³³ Rides have become so familiar that they now look integral to the woodland scene and it is fair to add they are vital for species of butterflies which do not tolerate the shade of deep woods. Murderous little alleyways, called cockshutts, were also cut for the specialised shooting of woodcock. The broad landscape of woods and fields, which at a glance appears entirely agricultural was, and remains, closely adapted to shooting.

Wildlife effects

The past distributions, mixes of species and population levels of wildlife are often reconstructed by combining modern censuses and accounts of past land-use.Footnote ³⁴ This can become circular, with anecdotes about former animals or birds taken as indicating the existence of suitable habitats while the presumed habitats are taken as indicating their occupation by a particular fauna. In view of the ecological plasticity of some, though by no means all, species the approach is doubtful. The answer is to combine dated and located records with documented reports of land use, which of course reduces the total of available observations.

If hunting affected the physical landscape relatively little, it altered biology rather more. The point was made with respect to the Cheshire countryside by that superb naturalist, A. W. Boyd, long-time writer of the Country Diary column in the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ³⁵ The most obvious species whose population grew as a side-effect of hunting was the fox itself – a serious pest, whose depredations were felt even more keenly by small farmers and poultry keepers in the past than they are now. Preserving the fox had significant consequences for other wildlife. Any group of marl or clay pits, or piece of uneven ground, was planted with trees to form additional coverts called Roughs. In parts of the Midlands this involved planting woods where there may have been no woodland for a thousand years.Footnote ³⁶ Gorse brakes, too, were established to harbour foxes. Birds that the game preserver would have wished to destroy flourished in the coverts: magpies, carrion crows, jays, sparrow hawks and kestrels. There, too, the rabbit, that arch-pest on farm crops, lived alongside fox, badger and stoat. Small birds nested and the coverts were favourite roosting places for vast flocks of starlings. ‘Warblers and the woodland flowers which are disregarded and even unnoticed by many a keeper,’ wrote Boyd, ‘owe much to him and to his employer.’

In certain places foxes were already preserved for hunting in Elizabethan times but were targeted in most districts as a menace to livestock. Usually foxes figured high on the list of vermin. Payments by the vestry for killing them had been high during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and some parishes paid private fox-catchers or huntsmen to track them down. But from the mid-eighteenth century fox-hunting became a craze among the landed classes and from that period foxes were increasingly preserved, both directly by forming coverts and constructing earths in which they might breed, and indirectly by frowning on the traditional means of control.

This preserving of foxes was a signal shift. Communal netting expeditions by villagers to control foxes had to give way to the mounted hunt. In any case, the increased privatisation of the land and establishment of strict game preserves decreased the area over which villagers might go on netting expeditions. Roger Lovegrove surmises that landowners who wished to preserve foxes began to look askance at the inclusion of the fox among the vermin for which the vestries paid a bounty.Footnote ³⁷ During the first half of the eighteenth century the churchwardens of St. Mary Bourne, Hampshire, had paid for ten to thirty foxes per annum. ‘The destruction of the animals began to wane about 1750,’ according to the nineteenth-century historian of the parish, which fits with the general chronology of payments for them as vermin.Footnote ³⁸ The Victorian historian of Lymington, Hampshire, wrote of the payments in his parish, ‘a fox's head in a hunting parish would now be looked at askance’.Footnote ³⁹ Thereafter, estate workers and inhabitants of tied cottages, whether or not they were poultry keepers, knew better than to be accused of killing foxes. So did tenant farmers. Vulpicide became a moral crime. Gamekeepers were forbidden to kill foxes and usually went out of their way to make sure there were some for the hunt. After a blank day in 1845, it was said that if Sir John Cope's hounds were ever again to draw the coverts at Strathfieldsaye, Hampshire, without finding, all the keepers would be sacked instantly.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Victorian times the Cravens at Ashdown, Berkshire, received poison pen letters alleging that their keepers were killing foxes.

The point is that foxhunting was less a form of pest control than its opposite. It was problem more than solution. Particularly once the eighteenth-century territories, fifty miles by fifty miles, had been carved up among the larger number of Victorian hunts, fox populations rose. ‘They became much more numerous when preserved for the hunt’, observed Boyd, who, unusually for a naturalist, was well aware of the vermin accounts.Footnote ⁴¹ When English supplies failed to suffice, foxes were even imported from the continent, supposedly as many as 1,000 per annum in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴² This may seem to indicate that foxes were not numerous. More likely it testifies to peak demand by the increased number of hunts, each wishing to guarantee animals to hunt several days a week throughout the season, or to the extent of surreptitious killing by gamekeepers and others, or both. Subsequently more effort was made to preserve English-bred specimens and the conclusion must be that in the long run the dominance of ritualised fox-hunting in rural society encouraged the expansion of the fox population. It is not reasonable to conclude, as Griffin does, that ‘hunters are usually the most diligent conservationists’.Footnote ⁴³ That applied only to their target species, until such time as they set about killing it. Elsewhere it applied only inadvertently, as through the protection the coverts afforded to other species, described by Boyd. He wrote that they ‘have had a far greater effect on other forms of life than those responsible for them have ever realised’.

Coursing likewise produced significant effects. Whereas foxes were a menace to poultry, hares were pests that ate grass and crops. The density that hares could reach may be gauged by figures of kills. When Lord Craven temporarily fell out with the Ashdown coursing club in 1800 he had the hares killed. Over a few days 1600 hares were slaughtered in ‘a most dreadful warfare’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In East Anglia much larger numbers were eliminated on occasion, such as 3,000 on one Suffolk estate over six days in 1849, by coursing them with greyhounds until the hounds would run no longer. The 1,215 shot in a single day by eleven guns at Holkham, Norfolk, in 1877 set only a ‘near record’!Footnote ⁴⁵

Enough accounts survive, nevertheless, to indict habitat change as the greatest single influence on past distributions of wildlife in general, notably fluctuations in the area under the plough.Footnote ⁴⁶ Game preservation was the next most potent influence.Footnote ⁴⁷ In gamebird preserves, in direct contrast to fox coverts, sparrow hawk and kestrel were destroyed, magpie, jay and crow kept down, stoats and weasels trapped, and sometimes even owls (‘most valuable of the farmers’ friends’) were shot.Footnote ⁴⁸ Rabbits and rats flourished accordingly. On the positive side, the reduced numbers of raptorial birds meant that smaller birds were more numerous than elsewhere.

During and long after Victorian times there was intense pressure on all predatory species and on any other conceivable, as well as many an inconceivable, competitor with game. Abundant testimony to this exists, recorded in an age when killing ‘vermin’ was taken for granted and no need was felt for the least circumspection. Norman Moore compiled much-cited maps plotting the inverse distribution of intensive game rearing and breeding buzzards.Footnote ⁴⁹ Until twenty or twenty-five years ago gamekeepers’ gibbets, adorned with the corpses of ‘vermin’ and not infrequently those of protected birds, were common near the edges of woods.Footnote ⁵⁰ Admittedly, the birds of prey so relentlessly shot, trapped and poisoned were of minor agricultural significance, although the owls destroyed would have curbed the numbers of rats and mice.

The general consequences were already summed up in the 1880s by Richard Jefferies, in his essay, ‘Nature and the Gamekeeper’.Footnote ⁵¹ To the naturalist, Richard Jefferies’ evaluation is completely plausible. He listed twenty species that were hard pressed. The pine marten and polecat had become extinct in lowland England, and barn and tawny owls were being killed, yet despite everything the keepers could do, another eleven species on his list were managing to survive. They included stoats, weasels, jays, magpies, kestrels, and surprisingly sparrow hawks and crows, every one of them prime targets for the game preserver.

As to riverine species, there was a long process of privatising any stream that could be used for sport fishing, with serious social and ecological consequences. Marine species like salt herring, and few enough of those, replaced freshwater fish in the diets of the poor.Footnote ⁵² Once the rivers had been privatised no working man fished with hook and line and the only river waters left open to him were pools under bridges. He might be permitted to take crayfish by hand, take eels, or snare predatory pike with a wire loop on a long pole. In rare places poles were stored under the roof of a nearby stable ready to be borrowed by anyone who spotted a pike on his way home from work.Footnote ⁵³ This was a jack-pole, to snare jack or pike, which were fierce predators on other fish, and the removal of which was in the interest of owners of the fishing rights. Hoffman raises the important question of whether the English elite were able to get away with monopolising rivers for angling because of the country's special access, as an island, to sea fisheries.Footnote ⁵⁴

Energy flows in rivers were diverted to foster trout, the species most favoured by anglers. Management became intensive during the Victorian heyday of fly-fishing. Ironically, trees on the banks had been felled in the early nineteenth century in order to fish with the blowing line, whereas the later preference for casting flies brought some trees back for the sake of the shade that trout prefer. But weeds and mud were cleared out every year, drastically altering the ecosystem and the appearance of the river valleys. One angling website states that the most famous trout-stream, the Test, was not even a river in the usual meaning of the term until eighteenth-century farmers reconstructed the feeder streams.Footnote ⁵⁵ Isaac Walton, it adds, probably fished with worms (on the Itchen rather than the Test) in tiny rivulets, not along the banks of classic beats like Victorian and modern fly-fishers. No sources are supplied but it does seem likely that the multiple braided channels of streams on the chalk and limestone were originally wandering and marshy. Only when they had been rearranged, and hatches installed to irrigate the water meadows for livestock husbandry, would the well-marked main streams preferred for fly-fishing have been fully established. Irrigated pasture and fishing rivers thus co-evolved. Nevertheless, since the floating of meadows was well developed during the seventeenth century, Isaac Walton may in reality have fished rivers like those familiar to his successors. Either way, nineteenth-century landowners interested in the rising value of their fishing rights retained the canalised rivers, although they could never halt disputes between farmers, millers and water-keepers over regulating the flow of water.

Once again the incomparable Richard Jefferies provides the most cogent account of the ecological consequences of river keeping, in his 1884 essay, ‘The Sacrifice to Trout’.Footnote ⁵⁶ He reported that sixteen species were thinned out, especially the otter, but also pike and perch, heron, kingfisher, moorhen, coot, mute swan, mallard and teal. After Richard Jefferies’ day, the water keeper of the Houghton Club (founded 1822) on the Test, who retired in 1931, was killing 150 little grebes every year and his son, who followed him in the post, admits killing them since.Footnote ⁵⁷ All these species were accused of preying on the trout, eating trout fry, or competing with trout for food and space. For that reason, when the fishery on the Wylye in Wiltshire was restored between 1891 and 1895, following a period of dereliction, 3,169 pike and 13,056 other coarse fish were killed.Footnote ⁵⁸

All this activity on land and water represented major alterations of ecosystems but the long term, or very long term, consequences were not always quite as dire as they seem. The layperson's notion of a golden age in the past, when wildlife was everywhere abundant, does not bear close examination. There was, for a start, intensive pressure on natural resources by the rural population, involving uses for plants and animals so intricate that the modern mind can scarcely guess them. Moreover, two opposed effects of game (and fish) preservation were warring with one another. Admittedly the first seems consistent with the golden age theory. This was the ‘Allee effect’, when populations are so reduced and scattered that individuals cannot find mates and become extinct, at least locally, as happened in lowland England to some of the mammals and land birds listed by Richard Jefferies. It is only now, when gamekeepers buy their pheasants from game farms and do not attend so much to pest control, that species like the buzzard, raven and polecat are able to recolonise the lowlands vigorously from the highland zone.Footnote ⁵⁹ The second effect was, however, dominant. This was so-called ‘rat farming’, whereby persecution was self-defeating except in the short run, since attempts to eliminate pest species left for the survivors the best territories, nesting sites and feeding spots. Richard Jefferies indicated this with respect to the species that outlasted every effort by the keepers to eliminate them.

Agricultural effects

Sporting and farming practices interacted and it is not always easy in retrospect to tell which it was that led. Landowners could oblige tenant farmers to adapt to their requirements but sporting practices had nevertheless to adapt to significant developments in farming techniques. Once a sporting landowner had internalised the adjustment, tenant farmers would be expected to conform to the new equilibrium, at least until the next striking change in agriculture's methods or circumstances. The reaping machines of the mid-nineteenth century cut the stubbles lower than did the scythe, partridges took fright sooner, and the keepers had to drive them into the turnip fields. Wet turnips were hard going for gentlemen trying to flush the birds for a shot, hence beaters were hired and the fashion for shooting birds driven over the guns came to prevail. Bags rose, particularly those of pheasants, which are easier to drive than low-flying partridges.

Turning to the hunt, it caused direct damage, trampling grass and crops, breaking hedges and gates, and dispersing flocks and herds. Tenant farmers were expected to acquiesce and although they received some compensation afterwards, their routines were disturbed and time lost. Where farmers were enticed into taking part themselves, their management was likely to suffer.Footnote ⁶⁰ It was fox-hunting and coursing that delayed the adoption of cheap and effective wire fencing, thanks to the huntsman's hatred of ‘bird-cage’ country, although during the depression of the late nineteenth-century tenants had to be permitted to adopt anything they thought might reduce their costs. Wire was what terminated coursing in the second oldest club in the country, Ashdown, in the 1890s.

Otherwise the emphasis on sport meant that farming was made partly subservient to its needs. Estate landscapes, as we have seen, were often designed for sporting purposes. Wherever there was a folded flock, tenant farmers were notoriously dictated to by their head shepherds, who determined rotations and routines. On a sporting estate, which meant almost everywhere, the shepherd in turn played second fiddle to the head keeper, who might also, with the landowner's backing, dictate where the estate woodmen were to plant their trees. During the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries woodland coppicing might be delayed until after the shooting season. Long, narrow woods and lots of conifers, accompanied by fields of fodder crops, meant the co-production of game birds and pests, notably wood pigeons but also plagues of squirrels. By the late twentieth century, when innumerable game strips of maize were planted, there was a similarly damaging explosion in the numbers of deer.

The nurturing of game species and concomitant preservation of pests laid a burden on tenant farmers, especially before the Ground Game Act. Landowners inserted restrictive covenants in their leases to protect sport.Footnote ⁶¹ David Stead has shown how landowners typically shifted much of the risk inherent in agriculture onto their tenants; covenants were one means by which this was carried out.Footnote ⁶² The scale is evident from the fact that around 1880 over half of England consisted of estates of more than 1,000 acres and the majority of farmers were tenants. Yet farming on sporting estates required considerable investment and was unlikely to pay high dividends, as was exposed when rent rolls fell in the Great Depression and landowners had to scrabble for new farm tenants or admit urban sportsmen who would rent the shooting or fishing.

Until Victorian times a surprising proportion of land lay uncultivated in heaths and commons used mainly for low intensity grazing and tasks such as cutting peat for fuel and gorse for bakers’ ovens. Moreover, a growing share of the land surface was withdrawn into parks. Between 1760 and 1820 the number of parks doubled in the Home Counties and increased almost as much elsewhere, the difference being accounted for by relative distance from the metropolis.Footnote ⁶³ Parks varied in size and counting them does not necessarily measure the extra acreage put under parkland, yet there is no doubt that a very significant total area was exempted from full agricultural use. Parkland was used for grazing and the hay was cut to stop the grass growing tall and unsightly but the grazing stock was not infrequently ornamental breeds.

The withdrawal of land from cultivation and subordination of farming to sport meant that agricultural profitability and productivity were being voluntarily reduced.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was equally true every time a river keeper inconvenienced a farmer, whose concern was the spring bite of grass from the water meadows, by drawing the hatches for the sake of the fishing. Existing husbandry techniques could have turned much of the land withdrawn from cultivation into productive acres, indeed parks were not infrequently created from fields that had previously been farmed. The point calls into question the generally accepted Pomeranz thesis of world history, which is that by 1800 England had come up against a resources barrier from which the economy escaped only by luck.Footnote ⁶⁵ On the contrary, perhaps excepting the temporary emergency during the Napoleonic wars, there was slack in the system after that date.

However loudly agricultural commentators and improving landowners expounded the advantages of extending cultivation, the deeds of the landowners showed that they usually meant, ‘on land other than we desire for sport’. Instead of accepting the advocacy of the ‘improving’ literature at face value, a better approach is the one standard among economists: examining ‘revealed preference’, which is to say looking at what was actually done rather than what was said. We should remember that much of the improving literature was general in tone and, when it was specific, often recommended extending cultivation over someone else's land, typically where small owners and commoners held the rights. If land of that type could be cultivated, well and good; if it could be acquired by landowners (who were often engrossing common rights already) so much the better.

None of this demonstrates that landowners were willing to see farm output maximised at the expense of sport or that agricultural expansion was urgently crowding out hobby uses. The reverse was the case but its magnitude would be hard to calculate. Plenty of snippets exist, and there are relevant materials in some estate records, but their statistical representativeness is unclear. It would be extraordinarily hard to find matching samples of farms and estates where, in one set, game was shot or foxes hunted, and in the other, a rare landowner eschewed such sport. The cost of altered rotations would be difficult to pin down. Even if the task could be carried out on any large scale, controlling for local differences would be difficult. This remains a task for the future; meanwhile the overall effect is undoubted.

The rationale of taking an increasing reserve of environmental resources into sporting uses was perhaps along Hoffman's lines, that England could ‘afford’ to do this, at least if the reduced intake of fresh protein by the poor was discounted. Discounted it was. Forbidden to kill game species, the poor made shift to eat ‘vermin pie’, including such trivia as house sparrows, trapped at roost by ‘bat-fowling’ along the hedgerows. Farmers and landowners did not discourage this type of activity because from their point of view it was pest control for free.

The sporting legacy

Blood sports are generally ritualised and old-fashioned in respect of procedures, equipment, dress codes, social character, and the use in each case of a special cant. Their cost, especially the expense of access to the land and rivers, limits participation. Harvey Osborne observes that the technologies have altered and it is true that sporting histories are often written around successive developments in technology, above all with respect to guns.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet, despite new materials which have made it easier to bring birds, animals and fish to the kill, the culture remains essentially Victorian. We need think only of the costume donned by fox-hunters and their antique terminology. Anglers and shooting men adopt artificial rules of engagement to counteract the superior killing efficiency of the tools available today and to permit comparisons of bags. Some perfectly effective older methods are excluded, such as snares and animal traps, or nets, nightlines, spearing with lights and tickling fish. Disraeli used to fish for trout on a Berkshire river and, although he was successful, the country wenches were unimpressed: they used to roll up their sleeves, dip their arms in the water, and quickly land a dish of fish.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such techniques have retreated into the hands of poachers, the descendants of people who killed more for the sake of the pot than the sake of the kill. The older, less fancy, methods have been proscribed by law in favour of stylised sport with limited participation. Even tickling fish, indeed catching fish in any way other than by rod and line, has now been criminalised.

Today, at least until the current boom in cereal prices, blood sports have, in the title of an article in The Economist, ‘saved the countryside’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is not the first time earnings from them have replaced or supplemented declining incomes from agriculture. At the start of the depression in 1880, Richard Jefferies noted the rapid switch of landowner investment towards providing sporting services. Equipping and letting shooting- and fly-fishing lodges to Londoners was a means of offsetting falling farm rents.Footnote ⁶⁹ The rural sporting tenantry likewise seized its chance and in the case of Suffolk was occupying two-thirds of country seats by the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ Whenever one group could no longer afford its sport, another group took over. During the worst of the interwar depression even farmers grumbled that they had to let their own shooting to shopkeepers and urban professionals.Footnote ⁷¹

Membership of the prime sporting communities is seldom directly inherited. In Wiltshire, only three of thirty-two great houses which belonged to landed families in 1877 remain in the hands of their descendants, although two others own land nearby. Among the mere gentry, the sole family still in possession had to buy its estate back in 1957.Footnote ⁷² The largest landed aristocrats were the only men with sufficient non-agricultural sources of income to weather the Great Depression; farm rents were not enough, if they could be gathered at all. Otherwise new men and new money replaced the landowners of 1877.

An ever-springing fount of commercial capital has found blood sports both enticing and useful, thereby reproducing the deformed ecosystems and inaccessible private acres long characteristic of the English countryside. This illustrates the necessity of combining historical and structural explanations.Footnote ⁷³ Historical explanation alone is incomplete, giving the misleading impression that sporting arrangements have been passed on automatically down the years. Instead, those with extra-agricultural resources have, as it were, imitated the past by virtue of their selections from the menu that history has presented. They have chosen some of the sporting pastimes of previous elites, but not every item: hawking fell out of fashion, while coursing and otter-hunting were fading away even before they were suppressed.Footnote ⁷⁴ This selective reproduction of traditional ways is analytically distinct from inheriting them holus-bolus and indicates different mechanisms at work. It emphasises the point that rural history cannot be severed from the economic history of the larger society. Without influxes of new money in successive periods there is no reason to suppose that so many of the old ways could have been sustained through good times and bad times for farming. The money has tended to come from individuals with little experience of life on the land, but would not have been forthcoming from an urban bourgeoisie whose role models had changed and who spent its capital in other ways.

Hence the countryside has been caught in a double trap. During arable depressions, especially between the wars, cultivation was sometimes continued solely to facilitate shooting and many contemporary commentators refer to land bought purely or mainly for that purpose. The Game Conservancy graph of the total bag of pheasants on a large sample of estates between 1900 and 1990 dips only in wartime; it scarcely registers the interwar depression and has been rising ever more steeply since 1950.Footnote ⁷⁵ The sporting niche has been perennially occupied by new money, of late from corporations and more recently from international corporations too. A candid supporter of blood sports, Max Hastings, expressed the hope that shooting would not become, ‘a company paintballing outing with vast numbers of live creatures for targets’.Footnote ⁷⁶ That is precisely what it has become.