Emma Griffin's Blood Sport offers a long historical perspective on what, with the passing of the 2004 Hunting with Dogs Act, a certain sort of conservative Briton might have worried was yet another national treasure consigned to the past: foxhunting. In actuality and as this engaging work inclines one to expect, this legislation is proving to be just another wrinkle in the shifting circumstances that have made that sport and its history. Benefiting from several decades of scholarship on hunting, Griffin reviews the many dimensions and transformations of what by the late twentieth century was one of the nation's most politically freighted sports. She organizes an analysis of the medieval and early modern periods reign by reign, detailing successive monarchs’ enthusiasm for the hunt and their variably successful exploitation of royal forests for pecuniary and recreational purposes. Woven into this and carried into an examination of the modern era that closes with the 2004 legislation are the details of technique and technology, dress and decorum, human, animal, and environmental interactions, and privilege and protest that make this sport such an interesting historical subject. And although the book's title suggests otherwise and Griffin does pay some attention to the variability of hunting, it is foxhunting that figures center stage. This was the modern sport that offered the thrill, chase, and challenge of the medieval hunt; it was its one “genuine … descendant” (238).

The rise of a long reviled species of vermin to the highest rank of hunting prey is a fascinating thread in the history detailed here. From the late 1700s the fox began to enjoy the dubious privilege of being chased and killed according to the elevated rites and ritual of par force, in which a solitary animal is run down by hounds and mounted hunters. Introduced by the Normans in the eleventh century, this method was reserved originally for the most noble of prey: the stag and wild boar. But as pressures such as population growth, competing uses for land, and shrinking habitats rendered these animals extinct (boar pretty much by the fifteenth century) or scarce (wild deer by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the ascendancy of the fox began, and by the mid-1800s what in some views is one of the most contrived, least rational forms of “pest” control ever conceived had established itself as an elite sport. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this development is the fact that by the 1990s par force hunting, a potent symbol of royal and aristocratic privilege, was able to represent itself as one of the most inclusive of sports—and marshal tens of thousands from a wide social spectrum to demonstrate in support of that claim. (In March 1998, a quarter of a million people gathered under the umbrella of protecting the “countryside” and marched through central London. Manifestly a pro-hunting rally, this event helped derail a bill to abolish foxhunting that at the time seemed likely to make its way through parliament and into law.)

But if hunting's capacity for adaptation, adjustment, and survival is a major theme of Griffin's account, so too is the constancy with which it has indeed spoken to the social tensions arising from the monopolization of land and power that lie at its heart. From the Normans and their forest laws with which Griffin's narrative proper begins, through 500 years of game law making and breaking, to the pro- and anti- protests at the end of the twentieth century, “hunting of all kinds has been a source of social conflict” (9). As long as deer were plentiful, conflict largely roiled among the privileged and powerful. The Magna Carta and, in 1217, the Charta de Foresta were two notable early challenges the nobility mounted against the restrictions royal forest law imposed upon them, and as they began to acquire forest charters of their own during the thirteen century, so started “an unending conflict” between landowners “over who might hunt what deer, and when” (41). Except, of course, that the deer-hunting conflict did end, after the Civil Wars, when the fine balance upon which all such sport depends—between killing and preserving sufficient prey to be able to kill again—was upset once and for all. Two decades of war, riot, and wholesale depredation left both royal forest and private deer park alike shadows of their former selves and although the monarchy eventually returned, the sport it had so long favored became “no more than a distant memory” (104). Hunters necessarily turned their attention to smaller mammals and birds—hares, partridges, and pheasants. The 1671 Game Act inscribed a class divide through a weighty body of legislation that excluded 99 percent of the population from the pleasure and profits the sport afforded.

The nineteenth century saw some legislative redress for the middle classes and tenant farmers if not for the rural poor, and chapter 12, in which Griffin charts these developments and explains their interaction with technical, technological, and social factors is organizationally pivotal. Judging that small game shooting, with its ever more accurate firearms and hundreds and thousands of birds more or less “delivered” to the guns, was so “degraded” by the Victorian era that it “could no longer be considered ‘hunting’ in any traditional sense of the word” (162), she turns her attention to the also traditional but rather dull foxhunt. Eighteenth-century innovations—especially the selective breeding of fast horses and hounds—transformed this into an exciting sport and worthy bearer of the medieval par force spirit. Like deer hunting and small game shooting, modern foxhunting involved a complex interplay between the human and natural world and a contriving and manipulating of the latter that, while it might have made for good sport for some, damaged the interests of others. It is in the foxhunting set's adroit handling of the latter issue, in its canny accommodation of nonelites—humbly mounted farmers, foot and car followers—that much of the explanation for what was by the late twentieth century its evidently broad appeal lies, as Griffin ably demonstrates.

The eighteenth century during which the modern form of par force hunting emerged also witnessed the rise of moral and humanitarian objections to the sport, and Griffin devotes her final four chapters to examining how these eventually prevailed. In the end a combination of “New Labour” backbench energy, public opinion, and a vigorous animal rights activism trumped the rural conservatism that had sustained foxhunting in the face of its opponents for over a century. On the question of why so much time, money, and passion were spent in settling whether or not the sport should be banned, as she did in a previous book on animal baiting and fighting sports, Griffin concludes that the heart of the matter is what these activities tell us about “the kind of society in which we wish to live.” The 2004 act was about defining “Britishness for the new millennium” (232), and that new Britishness could not countenance deriving pleasure from the hounding and killing of foxes.

Blood Sport provides an invaluable perspective on a set of activities that have often been seen to reveal key aspects of “Britishness,” but in this study who and what that term encompasses is undoubtedly limited to England and the English—more particularly perhaps, and in the various shades of the term “Middle England.” This is understandable given Griffin's interest in foxhunting, but that focus comes at the expense of delivering a work with the kind of regional, racial, and multinational depth and complexity her title promises; if any such study figures in her future research agenda, it will be worth waiting for.