Note 95 — Chapter VIII · OF THE FOX AND OF HIS NATURE

Our MS. only gives this one chapter on the fox, while Gaston Phœbus has another: Comment on doit chassier et prendre le renard. In this he gives directions as to earth-stopping, and taking him in pursenets, and smoking him out with "orpiment and sulphur and nitre or saltpetre." He says January, February, and March are the best months for hunting, as the leaf is off the trees and the coverts are clearer, so that the hounds have more chance of seeing the fox and hunt him closer. He says that one-third of the hounds should be put in to draw the covert, and the others in relays should guard the boundaries and paths, to be slipped as required. Although this is a Frenchman's account of fox-hunting, we have no reason to believe that the fox was treated at that period better by English sportsmen, for until comparatively recent times the fox was accounted vermin, and any means by which his death could be encompassed were considered legitimate, his extermination being the chief object in hunting him, and not the sport. Even as late as the seventeenth century we find that such treatment was considered justifiable towards a fox, for, as Macaulay tells us, Oliver St. John told the Long Parliament that Strafford was to be regarded, not as a stag or a hare, to whom some law was to be given, but as a fox, who was to be snared by any means, and knocked on the head without pity (vol. i. p. 149).