The art and practice of hawking - Modern Prepper

4 ART AND PRACTICE OF HAWKING
losing their favourites. In the unsettled state to which Europe
was reduced by the innumerable wars consequent on the
Reformation, it was impossible for falconers to identify or
punish those who recklessly or deliberately slaughtered a
neighbour's lost hawks
; and although the offenders were still
liable to serve penalties, they could snap their fingers at the
protective laws. Finally, the more rapid subdivision of the
land, and its enclosure with fences for agricultural purposes,
spoilt, for the falconer's purposes, large tracts of country which
had formerly been the most suitable, and was especially hurtful
to the flying of the long-winged hawks, for which an expanse
of open ground is indispensable. On the Continent these various
causes operated surely but slowly to displace falconry in the
public estimation. But in England a special circumstance
almost ruined it at one blow. The outbreak of the Great Civil
War interrupted rudely all peaceful sports, and its disasters
destroyed a vast number of those who were the best patrons of
hawking. From the blow then struck English falconry never
rallied in any general sense. Certainly it did revive, or rather
survive, to a certain extent. It would be wrong to suppose that
the sport has ever been extinct in the British Isles, as so many
writers are fond of reiterating. But its devotees have kept it up
without any of the pomp and show which once distinguished it,
carrying on in comparative privacy, and in the retirement of
rather remote spots, an amusement in which the difficulties
always besetting the sport were aggravated by a thousand new
dangers and annoyances.
The annals of falconry, since it was deposed from its fashionable
place—in England by the Great Rebellion, and afterwards
in France by the Revolution—are obscure, and for the most
part buried in oblivion. Here and there the name of a notable
falconer, professional or amateur, emerges from the mist, showing
us that the sport was still carried on with vigour by a few. In
the middle of the eighteenth century Lord Orford flew kites in
the eastern counties, and this sport, as well as rook-hawking
and heron-hawking, was successively carried on by the Falconers'
Society, the Falconers' Club, and the High Ash Club, which
latter existed from about 1792 to later than 1830, and included
amongst its members Lord Berners, Colonel Thornton, and
other sporting celebrities. In Scotland falconry has always
been kept up. The life of John Anderson covers the whole of
the last half of the eighteenth century, as well as more than a
quarter of the nineteenth. This accomplished trainer of hawks
was for the first twenty years or so of the present century in