with the destinies of our Western territories that men’s wonder will be how colonial life went on before their date.
FALCONRY.
Modern England is once more rapidly assimilating her field sports to the nobler and more picturesque woodcraft of our feudal ancestors. A club of Falconers exists at this moment, near Ware,—the United Holland and English fraternity, known as the “Loo Hawking Club.” A hundred private mews,[1] supported by gentlemen in every county of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, with a regular trade in and interchange of falcons, broken and unbroken,[2] foreign and domestic, as of old, indicate an enthusiastic desire to revive this, the cherished sport of chivalry and mediæval England. Well adapted, like archery, for extending the scanty range of open-air exercises in which women can appropriately indulge, both these graceful pastimes have been enthusiastically adopted by the sex, by which their permanence and popularity are secured. Falconry has been revived, too, amongst officers of the army, as a congenial recreation for the military caste. At Aldershott camp, the Curragh of Kildare, and in the Phœnix Park, Dublin, scarcely a day in the season passes by in which this sport may not be witnessed, accompanied with all the pride, pomp, and circumstance peculiarly its own.
It may be observed that no art or craft has more copiously lent itself to the figurative and proverbial language of our forefathers, than the sport now enlarged upon. Poets, from Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, down to those of modern date, have borrowed metaphors and illustrations from falconry. Such of us as are familiar with Shakespeare will easily recall a hundred instances of these sylvan technicalities, which cavaliers and high-born dames deemed indispensable to colloquial elegance. “A gentleman,” says Lady Juliana Berners, the sporting prioress of Sopwell Nunnery, writing four hundred years ago, “is known by his horse, his hawk, and his greyhound.” “Hist, Romeo! hist!—O, for a falconer’s voice, to lure this tassel gentle back again!” sighs Juliet after her lover’s enforced departure. Prince Hamlet also uses “a falconer’s voice,” when to his friend Marcellus’s hawking cry, “Hillo-ho-ho! my lord,” he responds—“Hiilo-ho, boy! come bird, come!” like a sportsman recalling a goshawk to his wrist. Let me now briefly explain these terms of art. Lure is a device imitating the body of a fowl, with the real wings of partridge, grouse, or drake, fastened to its sides, whereon the hawk, whilst training, should be constantly fed, the meat being tied to it, whirled round the falconer’s head, or thrown to a distance. The docile bird, anticipating food, swoops down from her loftiest pride of place, and is again easily placed upon her master’s fist. “Tassel gentle” means a sagacious, loving, well-conditioned male hawk, being a corruption of tiercel, he being a tierce, or one-third less than his mate. Nature has endowed the latter with superior size and strength, for on her devolves the entire care of the brood, to find sustenance for which is no trivial labour where game is few and far between. In “Othello,” we have Shakespeare again speaking in the technicalities of this ancient sport, which he loved so well—the Moor thus apostrophising his hapless Desdemona—
E’en though her jesseIf I do prove her haggard,
E’en though her jesses were my dear heartstrings,
I’ll whistle her off, and let her down the wind,
To prey on fortune.
Haggard, is a hawk wild and stubborn, which no caresses can reclaim. Jesses are the short straps fastened to a falcon’s legs, by which she is retained on the wrist.
The Lady Juliana Berners—a sort of celibate Di Vernon in her day, who loved perhaps a high mettled falcon better than her breviary—was a lady of great beauty and mental endowments. Some of you have looked into her “Boke of St. Alban’s,” printed in Westminster Abbey by Wynkyn de Worde, and esteemed on that account by Frognall Dibdin’s disciples to be worth exactly its own weight in sovereigns: perhaps “fifty or so” might “turn the scale of its avoidupois.” My lady regarded falconry as a sport for princes, and a passionate love of it the sure criterion of gentle birth. Indeed, how many of our ancient worthies, in their portraits adorning the ancestral halls of Britain, are represented holding a hooded falcon on the wrist. She enumerates the various species of hawk specially assigned to different sportsmen according to their degrees of rank. Thus, the falcon gentle is for a prince, a falcon of the rock for a duke,[3] a peregrine for an earl, a goshawk for a poor man,[4] a musket for the holy water clerk, a kestril for a knave,[5] and last, not least, the bold, diminutive merlin for a lady.
For the ladies of old—and in modern days likewise—were and are passionate amateurs of this fascinating out-of-door pastime. When travelling, from castle to castle in a round of fashionable visits, the beautiful little merlin, equipped with embroidered jesses and silver bells, was never off their wrist. Sorry am I to add they carried them to church also, and many an edict is on record, launched by successive ecclesiastical councils, against the heathenish custom of perching hawks upon the edges of pews, where the sound of their- ↑ “Mew” means a building where hawks are generally kept, but more especially during the moulting season and in cold weather. During fine weather they do best and look best ranged in line, each with perch and tether upon a smooth-shaven velvet lawn. The King’s Mews at Charing Cross, though latterly used as stables, and also for keeping a very large portion of valuable Public Records in—to the great advantage of the legion of the genus Rodentia, that burrowed in them—were built originally for housing the royal falcons, which remained there for ages.
- ↑ Dutch falconers, from the village of Falconswaerd, near Bois le Duc, which is a colony of these old-world sportsmen, visit England every season, bringing for sale a supply of ready-trained falcons.
- ↑ At the Manchester Exhibition was a portrait, by Titian, of a Duke of Milan, holding the spar-hawk on his fist. The painter greatly errs in giving him a falcon beneath his rank.
- ↑ “Musket,” the male sparrow, or spar-hawk, a very game bird, of extremely elegant form, and very rapid wing. Hand firearms were quaintly named after this sporting hawk, allusive to the swiftness of the missile they discharge.
- ↑ “Knave,” a serving-man.
