Lord Egremont's Dogs: The Cynosure of Turner's Petworth Landscapes

In tracing the history of the Game Laws—those restrictions determining which classes of people could hunt, enter the forests, and own dogs—the nineteenth-century historian of dogs, George Jesse, provides a drawing of the so-called Parker Dog Gauge, which was simply an old stirrup used to measure "all dogs in the forest except those of the lords" in order to ensure that no dogs large enough to hunt game—the size of the gauge was seven inches by five inches—would enter the forest.¹ Jesse goes on to tell of how in 1770 the Duke of Montague, in an electioneering quarrel with his neighbors, seized their beagles and killed the ones that exceeded the limit.² While the Duke probably did not endear himself to his neighbors, he was certainly within his proprietary rights according to the Game Laws. In regulating actions among the different classes, as well as the relations between people, animals, and the land, the laws wielded considerable force in shaping the perceptions of the English countryside. These perceptions, along with their formation, can be traced in the paintings of artists whose works were often commissioned by aristocrats, artists like Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland, and, especially, J. M. W. Turner.

The Game Laws grew out of the ancient Forest Laws which forbade anyone but nobility and the clergy to hunt within the royal forests and on the lands adjacent to and connecting the forests. The upper classes justified the Game Laws with four claims. First, by excluding the right to hunt to all but substantial landowners, it was argued, the laws helped persuade the better country gentlemen to remain in the countryside, thereby ensuring social stability beyond the cities. Second, the laws prohibited the possession of any firearms by all residents except those qualified to shoot game and thereby supposedly reduced the possibility of armed insurrection by the lower classes. Third, in preventing the lower classes from hunting game, the laws were said to combat idleness among the rural laborers. And fourth, the laws ensured a plentiful survival of game.³

The Game Laws enforced a real division between those with proprietary rights over the land and its resources and those without such rights. In limiting who was qualified to hunt, the Game Laws sharpened the distinction between classes: for the qualified—aristocrats and landowners—hunting was sport; for the unqualified, hunting constituted the crime of poaching. Originally the right to hunt belonged to royalty, who could award rights to their favorites among the nobles; consequently, even as the qualification for hunting spread among landowning gentry, hunting always retained its royal association. Prior to the Hanoverians, the hunt was for boar and stag, and after the Civil Wars, when deer had become almost nonexistent in the forests, hunting with dogs evolved into three forms—coursing, foxhunting, and shooting. Because shooting, which focused on the destruction of birds, included guns as well as dogs, it was severely restricted to those qualified to hunt. Neither of the other two field sports technically violated the Game Laws after the seventeenth century when rabbits (though not hares) lost their protection under the Game Laws and hunting them required only the permission of whoever owned the warrens (or common property on common lands), and hunting foxes, which along with badgers and otters were considered vermin, required no property qualification at all.⁴ Coursing, in which greyhounds competed in chasing down and killing rabbits, supposedly held democratic connotations, as it could be enjoyed by all classes of men and women. Similarly, foxhunting was also open to people not technically qualified to hunt by the Game Laws and grew in popularity to become the dominant sport of both the aristocracy and the newly rich because the use of horses gave it associations with the old stag hunts, which were enjoyed exclusively by royalty. This association of foxhunting with the old royal stag hunt is exploited in one of the most notable hunt scenes of the late eighteenth century—George Stubbs's Grosvenor Hunt (1762), which was commissioned by the newly ennobled Lord Grosvenor as...