PREMODERN HUNTING LANDSCAPES

The historical development of foxhunting in the United Kingdom is still far from clear. It has recently been accused of being both “a pursuit rooted in the moral climate of the fourteenth century” and an “invented tradition” of the late eighteenth century.⁹

The contradictory nature of these statements stems from the fact that although foxes were hunted and trapped as vermin in the medieval period, foxhunting only became the preeminent form of recreational hunting in the second half of the eighteenth century. Such was its success however, that by the 1860s it was regarded by many, including the novelist Anthony Trollope, as the leading candidate for consideration as the national sport.¹⁰

Medieval or premodern hunting in England focused on deer and most was carried out within private parks. Protected by a substantial ditch and bank, surmounted by a cleft oak pale, the deer were removed from the wider landscape and carefully managed within the park, which in turn provided a specialized arena for the ritualistic performance of the hunt. Some deer were also hunted within unbounded areas of chase or forest, areas legally protected for aristocratic or royal hunting; but increasing pressure on land for cultivation and the declining population of wild deer, led to most being deregulated or disafforested by the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, captive or carted stags were often used within forest settings, such as Epping Forest (Essex), which only served to highlight the artificiality of what had become a self-consciously archaic aristocratic sport. Deer maintained their status as the most prestigious quarry into the eighteenth century, when there was a revival of deer hunting within the larger designed landscapes that were being laid out around the substantial new country houses of the nobility, such as Badminton (Gloucestershire) and Chatsworth (Derbyshire), which often incorporated the relict landscapes of earlier, medieval deer parks.

In contrast, other forms of hunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were informal pursuits enjoyed by country squires as well as lesser landowners and were pluralistic in terms of the quarry. The hare was preferred, in terms of the sport it showed; but foxes were hunted when they were found or when they posed a particular problem to local farmers. Contemporary comments suggest that hunting the hare was a slow-paced affair with plenty of time to observe the landscape and indulge in related interests such as botany or sketching.¹¹

Setting out to hunt the fox, however, was a laborious affair that involved both mounted and pedestrian followers as well as a dawn start to catch the fox above ground as it returned from a night's scavenging.

Most historical narratives of hunting focus on the necessary shift from hunting the noble hart or deer to the less distinguished fox, as a response to the declining population of deer. However, perhaps the most important distinction was that the deer was hunted within landscapes that were protected or managed specifically to facilitate hunting, whereas the alternatives, principally the hare and the fox, were hunted within, or on the periphery of, the cultivated landscape. As a consequence of this shift, the varied nature of regional agricultural landscapes had an important effect on the form and frequency of hunting during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Foxhunting was becoming increasingly popular in regions that contained large tracts of heath, commons, or rough grazing—typically found in the areas of lighter soils in southwest and northeast England. Celia Fiennes, for example, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, described the landscape around Newton Toney in Wiltshire as “all on the downs a fine Champion Country pleasant for all sports–Rideing, Hunting, Courseing, Setting and Shooteing.”¹²

Similarly, an estate map of Hackness (Yorkshire) from circa 1709 shows a foxhunt in progress across the extensive common land, away from the areas of cultivation (Figure 3).¹³ These open tracts of permanent grazing presented good conditions for hunting that not only avoided damaging crops but also avoided the complex rights of access associated with the communally farmed open-field systems that were characteristic of the same regions.

The Midland shires were also dominated by medieval open-field systems, in which the arable land was farmed as several large fields divided into strips and farmed communally by the village. The system was characterized by open, ploughed landscapes, devoid of hedges and woodland. But significantly, unlike in Wiltshire or Yorkshire, in the Midlands the arable fields often extended to the parish boundary; and grazing was limited to the fields that were left fallow each year.¹⁴

So although there are sporadic references to the fox being hunted in the shires during the sixteenth century, the extent of ploughed land, the complex tenurial arrangements, and the absence of cover in the form of hedges or woodland, meant that they were far from ideal hunting terrain, indeed, the structure and form of the agricultural landscape did not facilitate hunting of any kind.¹⁵

MODERN HUNTING LANDSCAPES

Both foxhunting and the Midlands landscape underwent radical transformations during the period 1750 to 1850, and it was during this period that the two came to be so closely linked. The transformation of the landscape was occasioned by the process of enclosure—the creation of discrete, hedged, or fenced fields held in severalty—which in turn facilitated a shift from arable to pasture. The process had begun in the fifteenth century when the earliest enclosures took place on the heaviest and most intractable clays of High Leicestershire and Northamptonshire.¹⁶

Despite this early phase of “enclosure by agreement” continuing throughout the seventeenth century, approximately half of the cultivated landscape in the shires remained in communal, arable, open-fields at the beginning of the eighteenth century when the first of two waves of parliamentary enclosure swept across England.¹⁷ The use of parliamentary acts simplified the procedure and allowed larger landowners to overcome resistance to enclosure, particularly from smallholders. They became the dominant vehicle for enclosure after 1750, and fall into two clear phases. The first, between 1755 and 1780, accounted for approximately 40% of all enclosure acts and peaked in 1770—and it was this phase that most affected the open fields of Northamptonshire, Rutland, and Leicestershire.¹⁸ The second phase, dating from the 1790s to the 1830s, was predominantly concerned with enclosing common land and waste to convert them to arable and take advantage of high cereal prices; and it had little affect on the shires where such land was scarce.

As mentioned earlier, the enclosure of the Midlands facilitated converting the heavy clay soils that were deemed unsuitable for modern arable cultivation into more profitable pasture. Documentary records of cropping rotations before enclosure suggest that between 75% and 80% of the acreage was arable in the open-field districts of Leicestershire prior to enclosure, whereas the 1801 Crop Returns show that after the first wave of enclosure acts only about one-sixth was still in arable cultivation.¹⁹

The new, postenclosure fieldscape was radically different: a patchwork of rectilinear grass fields replaced the previously open, ploughed landscape, whilst stock-proof hedges and fences marked out new patterns of private ownership and determined new rights of access across a landscape that had been communally farmed. The process also resulted in landownership being consolidated among a group of larger owners who could afford the expenses of enclosure—costs that forced smaller owners to sell up. So although enclosure may have been changing the landscape of the shires in a piecemeal fashion since the late-fifteenth century, the new processes utilized during the second half of the eighteenth century had an immediate and dramatic affect on the physical and cultural landscape: it is against this background that we must reimagine the rise of foxhunting.

The transformation of foxhunting into a fashionable sport is often attributed to Hugo Meynell, Master of the Quorn Hunt in Leicestershire between 1753 and 1804. It became characterized by an extended chase, with specially bred hounds that followed the scent and kept up with the fast-running fox; a large mounted field observed by following the hounds at a gallop, jumping or negotiating obstacles. Meynell's most significant contribution may only have been to draw together a number of disparate practices and to popularize the sport amongst a new, wealthy, and fashionable clientele; but the “Meynellian system” as it became known, was adopted right across England in the early nineteenth century. From the outset, however, this ideal of modern hunting was—and indeed remains—particularly associated with the distinctive landscape of the Midland shires: Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Rutland.²⁰

The new pastoral landscape supported the faster pace of the modern sport. The combination of continuous permanent pasture with thorn hedges and fences around relatively large fields, over gently undulating terrain, created an ideal hunting landscape. Furthermore, the quality of the pasture improved over the nineteenth century as it became established and as the considerable efforts to drain the clay soils took effect.²¹

Similarly, the hedges evolved over the nineteenth century from freshly planted thorn protected by post-and-rail fences to unkempt “bullfinches” when the thorns had been allowed to grow for some 20 years before they were transformed into neat “cut-and-laid” hedges. Journalists and hunting enthusiasts soon articulated what it was about the shires that made them so ideal for foxhunting. Surtees, for example, famously exclaimed that the Midlands provided the prospect of “Grass, grass, grass, nothing but grass for miles and miles.”²² A similar refrain is evident in early twentieth-century descriptions of the region as being blessed with “billowy acres of galloping grassland.”²³ The shires were the undisputed “eye of hunting England”; and from England foxhunting spread as far afield as the United States, Australia, India, and Iraq, which all maintained hunts by the late nineteenth century, even if they required the introduction of the red fox to operate.²⁴ As foxhunting spread across the globe, so too did the fame of the Midland shires.

It would be wrong, however, to simply view the landscape changes of the late-eighteenth century as creating the appropriate arena within which hunting could flourish. Meynell moved to Leicestershire and became the first master of the Quorn Hunt in 1753 at the moment the transformation was beginning, not once its manifestation was apparent. The parish of Quorndon, where Meynell established himself, was not subject to an Act of Enclosure until 1763, some 10 years after he became Master of Foxhounds, whereas the adjacent parishes were subject to even later acts, the last not being enclosed until 1799.²⁵

The early, preparliamentary phase of enclosures were focused to the east of the county on the elevated High Wolds, with another cluster to the southwest of the county.²⁶ The favored hunting country for the Quorn and Belvoir Hunts, however, centered on the river valleys, which were transformed by parliamentary enclosure and where earlier phases of enclosure had little affect.

Rather than seeing enclosure as a necessary prerequisite for hunting, it is important to recognize it was a contemporary cultural manifestation of the same forces that effected the physical changes within the landscape. By the early nineteenth century, the landscape could sustain fast, extended gallops, interspersed with challenging jumps; and the participating tenant farmers were prosperous gentlemen working new consolidated holdings, keen to demonstrate and enjoy their status. Foxhunting, therefore, was a conspicuous cultural practice that was embedded within the new landscape and became an iconic representation of both the social and agricultural changes associated with the transformation.

CREATING HUNTING LANDSCAPES

The reason behind the change to hunting the fox in the eighteenth century is usually explained simply in terms of the declining availability of deer as quarry.²⁷

Although rarely made explicit, this argument crucially assumes that foxes were relatively abundant. However, early hunt accounts and histories demonstrate that foxes were in fact scarce, and many hunts struggled to provide adequate sport when hunting just the fox, rather than the fox and the hare together.²⁸ Given that the fox was persecuted as vermin for centuries, it is not perhaps surprising that the historic population was small and fragmented. Indeed, it could be argued that the survival of the species into the modern era was in part because of the status of the fox as a form of quarry for hunters in the sixteenth century. There is evidence to suggest that there were differing attitudes toward the fox among smallholders on the one hand, who continued to persecute the fox as vermin, and the gentry on the other, who tolerated foxes on their land to provide sport. As early as 1577, for example, William Harrison wrote the following of foxes and badgers:

If the gentry's lack of persecution allowed the fox to survive into the eighteenth century, the growing popularity of foxhunting required more active conservation measures to promote and sustain the fox population. The adoption of a hunting season that respected the breeding cycle of the fox was one measure, because they were previously hunted in the spring when livestock was vulnerable during lambing and when the pelt was at its best for furriers but when the fox was raising its cubs. Once the fox became the preferred quarry of the hunt, however, the hunting season ended around March to establish a high and regularly dispersed population of foxes.

A key aspect of this new concern for fox preservation was the availability of suitable habitat. The open-field landscape in the Midlands had lacked suitable habitat for foxes in the form of hedges, scrub, or woodland, a factor that must also have contributed to keeping their numbers low. Enclosure brought hedges and permanent grassland, but there was still precious little tree or scrub cover so essential to encourage breeding. The drive for agricultural improvement and the high value of postenclosure land meant that few areas were allowed to remain uncultivated within this new productive landscape. However, the landscape of the Midland shires soon acquired a distinct character that set them apart from other regions enclosed at the same time, suggesting that there were different priorities behind postenclosure landscape development within the region (Figure 4). One of the most apparent differences is the presence of small, regularly spaced patches of woodland within the enclosed fieldscape. Hunts and hunting landowners put aside parcels of land as designated fox coverts throughout the shires to help establish and maintain a sizeable fox population. Corners of fields, areas of particularly steep slopes or scarps, prominent knolls, and even small closes were planted with gorse and blackthorn and carefully managed to provide areas where foxes could breed and raise cubs. Some coverts were even furnished with artificial earths, built of brick and tile, with a central den and several entrance tunnels, to encourage cub rearing (Figure 5).³⁰

The exact chronology over which coverts were established is difficult to establish, but hunt accounts include regular payments for managing or renting coverts from the late eighteenth century. Cartographic analysis confirms that coverts were established within the enclosed landscape, once communal rights had been removed and as landowners established their new holdings. They become a more significant element of hunt expenses during the nineteenth century as the sport became more popular and the demand for finding foxes increased. The names of coverts sometimes provide clues about when they were established, such as the Quorn Hunt's Botany Bay covert from the 1790s and the Pytchley Hunt's Waterloo Gorse of around 1817.³¹

Coverts varied in size, ranging from 1 acre to approximately 20 acres, with the name “Spinney” usually referring to a small covert of less than 10 acres, whereas “Gorse” or “Covert” was most commonly attached to purpose-made coverts of between 10 and 30 acres.³² Fortunately, many coverts are explicitly labelled as such on the early editions of the Ordnance Survey (OS) maps, published during the mid-nineteenth century when foxhunting was at its height.

The size and distribution of coverts was critical to the maintenance of the optimum fox population as well as to provide regular and reliable sport. Large areas of woodland allowed foxes to go to ground too easily, whereas smaller, regularly spaced coverts encouraged the fox to break and provide a chase across the fields.³³

The early nineteenth-century hunting journalist “Nimrod” identified the absence of large woods and the presence of small coverts as “a great recommendation” for the Quorn country in Leicestershire.³⁴ As hunts invested more money in maintaining and renting coverts in the late nineteenth century, the boundaries of hunt countries, over which individual hunts were entitled to draw foxes, became increasingly important and fixed. At the same time disputes between neighboring hunts became more common, and often centered on contested rights over particular coverts.³⁵ Although most coverts were initially maintained as scrub, some were planted with trees to provide future income, whereas many matured into woodland as management regimes were abandoned in times of agricultural depression and war. As the patchwork of gorse and thorn matured, so the shires developed a distinctly “bosky,”³⁶ wooded character, enhanced by the maturing hedgerows. The result was a different form of enclosed landscape than that found elsewhere in counties also transformed by parliamentary enclosure but where foxhunting was a less significant cultural practice.

It seems clear that the emergence of modern foxhunting alongside the newly enclosed landscape of the shires was symbiotic; but subsequently, foxhunting had a significant effect on the development of landscape character. Unlike the early hunts that took place on the periphery of the cultivated landscape, away from areas of arable cultivation, coverts located the fox firmly within the pastoral landscape and therefore made that landscape integral to the performance of the hunt. The scrub and hedgerow cover matured over the following 200 years into a landscape that is dramatically different not only from the earlier preenclosure landscape character of the region but also from other regions that also experienced enclosure in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were not so closely associated with the hunting phenomena.

The new landscape was celebrated in the popular songs published in increasing numbers during the nineteenth century to commemorate famous runs enjoyed by the various hunts. Perhaps the most famous of these was Billesdon Coplow, A Poem Descriptive of a Remarkable Day's Sport in Leicestershire on Monday, February 24th, 1800 by the Reverend Robert Lowth. It celebrates a run that lasted for more than two hours and covered approximately 28 miles between two coverts in the Quorn country, Billesdon Coplow and Enderby Gorse, where the (second) fox finally eluded the hunt.³⁷

The run was also recorded in a number of paintings, including one by C. Loraine Smith Esq. who was present and another by John E. Ferneley, the famous hunt painter based in Melton Mowbray.³⁸ The relationship between the fox and its local landscape became a theme of nineteenth-century hunting songs, as hunts established regional identities and vied with each other for prominence. One example from 1879, which celebrates the Bedale Hunt in North Yorkshire, contrasts the experience of hunting in the more famous pastures of Leicestershire with that to be enjoyed in the less celebrated and less fashionable country of North Yorkshire:

The songs articulate a popular local geography of hunting landscapes, linking place with moment through the recollection of exceptional runs across hunting countries. Although largely forgotten today, there is a wealth of hunting songs from right across England, including William Bromley-Davenport's The Dream of an Old Meltonian (1901), which recounts an imaginary run starting from Ranksborough Gorse in the Cottesmore country of Rutland. The culture of hunting was pervasive in all cultural aspects of the shires, something that is still apparent today. The fox appears as the symbol for Leicestershire County Council and Charnborough District Council, for example; and a fox mask features on the badge of Leicester City Football Club, who are still known colloquially as “The Foxes.” Despite the decline of hunting's economic and social importance within the region since 1945, it remains central to the region's cultural heritage and identity.

HUNTING AND HISTORIC LANDSCAPE CHARACTERIZATION

In the mid 1930s, Beach Thomas suggested that although the face of England had “marvellously changed” over the previous two and half centuries, each change (with the exception of barbed wire) “might have been especially designed to improve the art and craft of fox-hunting.”⁴⁰

That relationship was closest in the shires, where, as it has been shown, hunting was thoroughly integrated within the process of landscape change. Despite a drift back to arable cultivation during the postwar period, the regional landscape retains its characteristic form of hedged fields and small, regularly spaced copses and woodland. Many are fox coverts, but little systematic work has been done on their survival or loss within the landscape. A recent survey of lowland woodland parcels suggested that in regions where game management was practiced, a “significantly greater” proportion of woodland survived from the 1870s into the present day landscape than in areas where there was no game management.⁴¹ Preliminary findings for fox coverts suggest a similar correlation, with most of the woodland parcels present on late nineteenth-century OS maps surviving in the current landscape. A survey by the Game Conservancy Trust found that around 23,000 acres of woodland across the England and Wales was managed for foxhunting in 2002, which equated to approximately 6% of woodland within agricultural holdings and twice as much as that found within National Nature Reserves.⁴²

Established and managed woodlands are widely recognized and highly prized as playing a major role in sustaining biodiversity, but fox coverts are rarely considered in the same category.⁴³

However, just as with the woodland managed for game, a greater diversity of ground flora and fauna was noted within fox coverts than was found in nonmanaged woodland.⁴⁴ As such the coverts maintained by the hunts and hunting landowners form a key element within the ecology of the shires where they are the dominant form of woodland. In their submission to the Inquiry into hunting with dogs, the Quorn Hunt of Leicestershire noted that they owned 20 coverts of around 300 acres in total, whereas the Cottesmore Hunt of Leicestershire and Rutland owned a further 6 coverts. The well-documented continuity of management within fox coverts is important because although woodland surveys suggest that the extent of broadleaf woodland increased across Britain in the late 1990s, the figures conceal a decline in the extent of woodland that was present in the 1870s that supported richer and more complex ecosystems.⁴⁵ Foxhunting greatly increased the extent of woodland coverage within the Midland shires, and it did so in a distinctive manner with small patches of regularly spaced woodland. The management of that woodland for hunting created and sustained islands of considerable ecological significance. However, historical ecologists and landscape archaeologists have tended to focus on the significance of “ancient woodland,” and so nineteenth-century plantings have not attracted much attention. Within the context of the shires, however, these coverts represent a significant element within the natural landscape, and furthermore, have been celebrated in the various forms of cultural heritage as being a key element within the landscape character of the region.

Having made such an important contribution to the regional landscape character, it might be expected that foxhunting would feature in the initiative charged with facilitating the management of the historic landscape at a county level. Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) has been coordinated by English Heritage since 1994 and involves identifying and mapping the historic dimension of today's landscape, on a county-by-county basis, to create a tool with which to “protect and manage dynamic rural landscapes.”⁴⁶

Designed to inform management and planning decisions, HLC communicates the “quintessence” of landscape rather than merely identifying the sites of particular historical or archaeological significance within a landscape, as was the case with previous forms of designation.⁴⁷ By identifying and mapping types of landscape, such as “unenclosed land,” “woodland,” and “ornamental or recreational,” the character of the total landscape, field by field, reveals localized patterns that create the historic landscape character. Therefore, HLC should be ideally placed to recognize the landscape elements associated with hunting in the shires, such as the high density of hedgerows and the regular scattering of small coverts, which form such an important part of the regional landscape.

Northamptonshire County Council has completed its HLC, and it now forms part of the Environmental Character Strategy, alongside characterization of the natural landscape elements. The HLC document is divided into two halves, the first outlines a chronology of landscape development from the Paleolithic to the present; and the second describes and maps 12 landscape character types, including “19^th century Parliamentary enclosure” and “Large Modern Fields.” Despite Northamptonshire's place as one of the three main hunting shires, and home to prestigious hunts including the Pytchley Hunt, there is not a single reference to foxhunting within the HLC document. There is, however, a reference to the fact that in the Thornby-Watford Hills area, in the west of the county, coverts provide what little woodland there is in the absence of ancient woodland.⁴⁸

However, no explanation or definition is given as to the original role or function of these coverts, but they are noted as being eighteenth or nineteenth century in date. The absence of foxhunting as a contributory factor to landscape character stands in marked contrast to medieval and early modern deer parks, which are mentioned no less than 56 times. Most of the references refer to the partial survival of earthwork boundaries associated with the park pale, such as the survival at Fotheringhay.⁴⁹ The remains of a park keeper's lodge at Drayton Park are also noted as a “moated site,” and the presence of ancient woodland within the bounds of medieval deer parks is also recorded, as is the significance of deer parks as an early form of enclosure.⁵⁰ Deer parks even get a mention in one character area, “though no significant remains … survive.”⁵¹

The situation in Leicestershire and Rutland is slightly different. The HLC assessment is not yet completed, but there is a Landscape and Woodland Strategy for the region, which characterizes the physical and natural landscape in the manner that was subsequently developed as the model for HLC. The landscape is discussed in terms of its geology, soils, and climate as well as a brief consideration of the region's landscape development since prehistoric times. These variables are then used to divide the region into 17 character areas, which are deemed to share “a unity of character and a distinctive sense of place” resulting from “particular combinations of natural and historical factors which make one place different from another.”⁵²

These include, for example, character areas such as “High Leicestershire” and “Vale of Belvoir.” The emphasis placed on the combination of topography and historical landscape elements, and in particular the focus on the form and role of woodland within Leicestershire and Rutland, should again ensure that foxhunting is acknowledged within the strategy document. However, as with the Northamptonshire HLC, foxhunting is only implicit within the landscape; there is no explicit recognition of its role in creating landscape character. Fox coverts are referred to as being part of the “renowned” traditional landscape created through enclosure, and they are acknowledged as providing the main form of woodland within the Vale of Belvoir.⁵³ However, neither their history nor their role within the landscape is articulated. Hunting is assumed to be present, as in the quote used to introduce the regional landscape in the document, taken from the pioneering landscape historian W.G. Hoskins, who had close associations with the region: “[Leicestershire is] generally dismissed by those who have merely driven through it on the A6 as flat, pretty well covered with red-brick towns and villages, with somewhere in the unseen background a lot of fox-hunting going on.”⁵⁴

The other group of references to foxhunting relate to the possible affect of a ban since the document was prepared in 2001. It is acknowledged that a ban would have “particular implications for the Leicestershire and Rutland countryside in terms of small woodland and hedgerow management,” although “High Leicestershire” is the only character area for which a ban is identified as a specific management issue.⁵⁵

However, without any discussion of hunting's significance within the region, or its history, such comments are difficult to contextualize or evaluate. It is also worth noting that just as in the Northamptonshire HLC, deer parks also feature within the Landscape and Woodland Strategy. It is calculated that there were 55 medieval deer parks in Leicestershire and a further 11 in Rutland, and that they “still influence the counties landscapes” through continued use as an open or recreational space or the survival of ancient trees.⁵⁶

Two key issues emerge from this analysis of landscape characterization in the shires and the fact that the contribution made by foxhunting is ignored. Firstly, despite professing a move away from site-based designations, the substantial earthwork remains of deer parks are accorded greater priority than foxhunting in the HLC assessment for Northamptonshire. Deer parks have been an established element of medieval archaeology since Cantor's works in the 1960s and 1970s; and as an easily recognizable feature, they have continued to be cataloged and studied.⁵⁷

The attention given to deer parks reflects priorities within established archaeological research agendas and a reluctance among archaeologists to abandon the importance attached to sites within the landscapes.

The second point is that the involvement of archaeologists has been championed on the grounds that the discipline is most suited to take HLC forward because “archaeologists bring to cultural landscape an understanding of time-depth and long term processes.”⁵⁸

Predictably perhaps, longer-term narratives and explanations of landscape change have been presented as “essential for the sustainable protection, management, and planning of cultural landscapes.”⁵⁹ The stress on longer-term perspectives is reiterated in the search for a common European landscape heritage: the Council of Europe recruited cultural heritage, including the landscape heritage, “as a vehicle for the construction of a sense of European identity.”⁶⁰ To do so the archaeological time perspective was essential to establish a prenationalistic, prehistoric antecedent for a pan-European identity. In the United Kingdom HLC has become the “primary vehicle for achieving the goals and aspirations of the European Landscape Convention [ELC].”⁶¹

However, as previously argued, the celebrated character of the landscape in the shires has been produced over the last 200 years and is radically different from its antecedent landscapes highlighted by the longer-term view. It is also a landscape that has survived relatively intact, because the cultural practice that created it has continued, at least until the ban in 2005. It was also a landscape and practice that became ingrained within the regional cultural heritage, moving beyond the community who followed hunting to impact on other forms of popular culture. The failure of HLC to identify the landscape contribution of foxhunting as a cultural practice in the shires, despite the sheer volume of evidence available, suggests that the methodology and long-term perspective must be refined.

One solution might be to engage more actively in another of the aims within the ELC: the democratization of the landscape. Champions of characterization have extolled its virtues on the grounds that it “is a tool for participation: it provides a meeting place in which to draw together public and personal opinions as well as specialist values.”⁶²

How it provides that “meeting place” is not articulated, nor is the manner in which public involvement is facilitated. Crucially, for the case study discussed here, the ELC sets out that there are many different views of the landscape, and a landscape should be considered significant if it is recognized as such by a community. Furthermore, if its local distinctiveness is sustainable through traditional forms of management, “there is a particular difficulty with protecting or preserving landscape character where the activities that created it—notably traditional types of farming or land-use—no longer take place.”⁶³ From these statements it would appear that the well-defined hunting community that has been engaged with maintaining the regional landscape character through covert and hedgerow management over the last two centuries at their own cost, and who have articulated their relationship with the landscape through a variety of cultural media, should receive careful consideration as important agents in sustaining diversity and distinctiveness within the historic landscape. However, the terms “community” and “democratization” are never defined within these documents; and elsewhere a different agenda appears to emerge. Fairclough quite candidly admits that considerable differences might emerge between popular perceptions of importance within the landscape and those identified by archaeologists: “Understanding [about the cultural landscape] will only really be enhanced when we persuade everyone to recognise that there is a longer and broader history of the landscape than that revealed by historical documents of the past few centuries” [emphasis added].⁶⁴ Furthermore, whereas traditional types of farming or land use were lauded as the processes through which landscape character might be preserved, he later suggests that:

One can only conclude from these apparently contradictory statements that different priorities, definitions, and political agendas have yet to be fully worked into a methodology for protecting and sustaining the historic environment. Foxhunting has not, thus far, registered within a methodology for characterization that has prioritized an archaeological perspective of the landscape. Being a relatively modern development that has developed an integrated relationship with landscape character, foxhunting has neither the antiquity nor the material remains associated with medieval hunting practices. Nevertheless, foxhunting has undoubtedly had a major role in creating the regional landscape character of the present landscape in the shires and can demonstrate a significant and continuous heritage in the region. If the agencies involved in protecting the cultural landscape are serious about their pledges to recognize the many different views of landscape, and if they are committed to supporting sustainable management practices, they must acknowledge the role of the hunts in creating and sustaining the landscape of the shires. In doing so they must address how communities are constituted within the modern landscape and that some might claim a more active and significant contribution to the sustainable management of the historic landscape than others. They must also recognize that popular perceptions of landscape character may not extend beyond the last few hundred years; and although the archaeological perspective is important in understanding how those recent landscapes came into being, those views should not necessarily have precedence over others. To make judgments about the future of the cultural landscape, the first step is to ensure that all aspects of its history are presented without bias.