A rich heritage

Hunting has inspired "an ancient and wonderful" treasury of art and literature that has cemented the sport into our national – and natural – history

- By Rory Knight Bruce

THE importance of hunting in art and literature is as ancient and as wonderful as that 15th-century illuminated manuscript, Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.

Even before that, hawking and the hunting of the royal deer forests of England appear in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and afterwards in John Donne's powerfully metaphysical poem The Sun Rising when the poet/cleric commands: 'Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride.' This is a reference to King James I, known for his hunting passions.

The zenith for hunting literature and art, of course, took place in the Victorian era when hunting itself was at the height of popularity. In Market Harborough they "painted thy town red", and the works of Surtees, Trollope, and Thackeray were on every library fireside bookshelf.

Oddly, no mention of foxhunting may be found in any of the novels of either Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy. Both, it must be accepted, were essentially drawn to the social injustices of city, town and village life rather than the settled hierarchy, landscape and sporting structure of the chase.

To comprehend the importance of hunting in our literary and artistic heritage it is necessary to begin at the top.

The paintings of George Stubbs are peerless. However, for all the comic bravura of RS Surtees, the book that stands out is Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), notable for its accurate and mournful cadence set before the Great War, when all sporting and rural structures changed forever.

Max Egremont's Siegfried Sassoon - A Biography (2005) is unrivalled in its exploration of this brave officer and sporting Englishman.

When we cross the Irish Sea it is still impossible not to be enthralled by the novels of Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, in particular The Irish RM series, written in the early 20th century.