On of the things that interests me in relation to landscape, the landscape genre, the sublime and the uses of the countryside is hunting. Living off the land, whether collecting berries or hunting animals for food and protection, surely meets our most primal needs. I have from childhood been an opponent of fox hunting. As I child I felt empathy with the fox not the people on the horses. However, hunting is much more than this and even fox hunting has a context within farming; in the creation of ceremony and organisation of communal support to protect farmed animals in open country from wild predators. Many people who oppose fox hunting would support hunting by indigenous people even though they might have concern in supporting only those hunting methods that are the most humane. It is a complex and difficult topic. This passage from The Country and the City highlights one of the arguments, in a historical context, in relation to this topic:
To make many men poor and dependent, and then to offer them charitable relief, can perhaps, be seen as humane. But the landowning class required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. Slowly, through this period, there began, in many villages, a direct political struggle. The provision and control of pauper relief went alongside the intensified importance and prosecution of the Game Laws. The figure of what is called the 'poacher' becomes characteristic. A last property in nature, in its old way of life but now its 'preservation' of wild life as 'game', was directly and repeatedly challenged by men living and finding their living in their own places, their own country, but now, by the arbitrariness of the law, made over into criminals, into rogues, into marginal men.
The history of the game laws and of the men who defied them , is a central feature of the class struggle in nineteenth century rural society. In orthodox accounts the morality and the aesthetic of the so called owners, who developed in just this period their leisurely rituals of shooting and hunting, have been widely publicised, and very much later - when it didn't so much matter - there was the minor cult of the 'poacher' as a 'character'; the attractive and vagrant rogue. But there was always a different morality, which I remember hearing in the talk of small farmers and labourers. The immense presumption of this lordly ownership of the rabbits and the fish and birds -
To make many men poor and dependent, and then to offer them charitable relief, can perhaps, be seen as humane. But the landowning class required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. Slowly, through this period, there began, in many villages, a direct political struggle. The provision and control of pauper relief went alongside the intensified importance and prosecution of the Game Laws. The figure of what is called the 'poacher' becomes characteristic. A last property in nature, in its old way of life but now its 'preservation' of wild life as 'game', was directly and repeatedly challenged by men living and finding their living in their own places, their own country, but now, by the arbitrariness of the law, made over into criminals, into rogues, into marginal men.
The history of the game laws and of the men who defied them , is a central feature of the class struggle in nineteenth century rural society. In orthodox accounts the morality and the aesthetic of the so called owners, who developed in just this period their leisurely rituals of shooting and hunting, have been widely publicised, and very much later - when it didn't so much matter - there was the minor cult of the 'poacher' as a 'character'; the attractive and vagrant rogue. But there was always a different morality, which I remember hearing in the talk of small farmers and labourers. The immense presumption of this lordly ownership of the rabbits and the fish and birds -
And every beast did thither bring
Himself to be an offering
- was at once savagely asserted and skilfully challenged. I have heard my grandfather talk of the 'labourer's supper' with what seemed to me then as now an understandable pride: a rabbit knocked off behind the hedge, a swede knocked off at the edge of the path: a meal for eight children. If there are any ready to mourn the loss of a country way of life, let them mourn the 'poachers' who were caught and savagely punished, until a different and urban conscience exerted some controls. Or if there are any who wish to attack those who destroyed country customs, let them attack those who made the finding of food into theft.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. (this edition) Spokesman, Nottinham 2011 [p.p. 183 - 184]
No comments:
Post a Comment