Roger Scruton is right to point out that hunting in England means transgressing private property boundaries as well as affirming cross-class ties within rural communities. The enjoyment of liberty by means of walking or riding a piece of country is a vision shared by Ramblers and hunt followers alike, if they would only recognise it.
However, the idea of hunting as socially levelling that Scruton celebrates has always more accurately described provincial hunting countries (especially upland hill farming countries) than the fashionable Shires, and has been steadily disappearing from England since the time of William Cobbett. In 1821, Cobbett was already lamenting that the people he called the resident native gentry, who were "attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost" that is, hunting - were being replaced by incomers who were "foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour", and looked to the soil only for its rents, viewing it entirely as an "object of speculation". Cobbett saw only too clearly the way hunting as well as landownership and finance were heading in Britain.
In his enthusiasm to preserve foxhunting as a country sport, in itself a laudable aim, Scruton gives us a skewed view of hunting's history. Not only Tory landlords but the labouring poor have for centuries entertained themselves in the British Isles by hunting and coursing with hounds, netting and shooting, ferreting, and fishing. That this activity was often called, especially after the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, poaching or trespassing instead of legitimate hunting or sporting is too important to ignore as Scruton does.
In his eagerness to scupper anything like a left-historical view, Scruton dismisses out of hand Raymond Williams's account of class domination in The Country and the City. As John Barrell has recently reminded us, although Williams's tale of class struggle over land in Britain is too schematic, we would be foolish to ignore the fact that in the process, different people lost and gained access to land (and thus to sporting privileges). Even if society is not so much divided into polarised and monolithic classes as layered like mille-feuille pastry (in Henri Lefebvre's phrase), Barrell notes that "one leaf, however uneven, flaky, fragile, sits on top of all the others". And John Clare, though he sometimes had the music of hounds in his head when composing verse, would certainly have objected to seeing himself as an apologist for modern foxhunting. Roger Scruton has learned a few things from the excellent work of Nigel Everett and Hugh Brody; he could yet learn a few more.
