Tea at Trianon: Hunting and the English Civil War

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Hunting and the English Civil War

From H-net Online:

This tantalizing study engages with the English Forest Laws, the distinct law code covering the royal forests and primarily designed to protect the king’s deer, in the twenty years before 1642. Why did these jurisdictions prompt so many riots as the nation divided between Royalists and Parliamentarians? Daniel C. Beaver has trawled through the files of the Forest Courts to present four case studies where he fills out the courts’ procedural records with depositions generated in suits before the Court of Star Chamber or participants’ family papers. This approach generates plenty of detail demonstrating the local impacts of forest law, a medieval institution that weighed hard on territory under its jurisdiction.

These studies engage with the prestige that surrounded hunting and venison, while disputes that simmered in the 1630s and exploded in 1642 highlight royal interference in a core strand in gentry culture. Investigating the questions of honor invoked in a succession of local quarrels offers a fresh perspective on local communities’ decisions to attack royal forests as King Charles I’s Personal Rule crumbled into civil war. Some of the book’s most tantalizing references sample later royalist critiques of postwar societies that demeaned the honor of hunting. Newmarket Heath, a pamphlet play from 1649, jeered at the misadventures of some London merchants on a hunting trip who mangled the archaic jargon of the hunt before getting their come-uppances, with an alderman breaking his neck and the Lord Mayor hanged in a tree. In this royalist fantasy, the humor centers on the snob appeal of deer hunts whose rituals provided shibboleths for gentry and aristocratic culture. A further pamphlet from the 1660s, “The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwell,” grumbled that the civil wars had cheapened the aristocratic monopoly of venison, as a prestigious dish became just another meat.

It is clear that the king’s deer were difficult neighbors. This had been so through the Middle Ages. In the 1630s, the royal forests continued to protect deer for the king’s “princely recreation and delight of hunting and chasing,” which imposed additional constraints on farming such areas (p. 62). Livestock that grazed in the woods were to be removed for the “fence month” or “forbidden month” of the fifteen days on either side of Midsummer’s Day to leave the deer undisturbed after their fawns were born (p. 70). Under forest jurisdiction, gathering firewood, felling timber, keeping dogs whose front toes had not been amputated, or erecting fences that blocked wandering herds of deer were all offences. Clashes were inevitable, even without factoring in poaching, itself feeding a wider appetite for venison--and here a book on the forests that does not index “Robin Hood” only addresses some of the cultural resonances of hunting in English culture. Beaver highlights local consequences of the revived enforcement of the Forest Laws during the 1630s. Showing that as King Charles limited new peerages or knighthoods, alternative strategies for social display became sought after, with aspiring aristocrats and gentry securing grants making their estates deer parks, which delivered prestige but imposed new regulations onto their neighbors. Novel applications of ancient privileges provoked squabbles and skirmishes. (Read more.)