Aslan’s Army: What I Saw in the Cotswolds

'[O]ld England still exists in concealed corners. There remains the treasured land that our ancestors knew, ...' Or, as the Inklings knew it, 'Logres'.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

Hunting is a glorious renewal of a covenant with the land, that common setting that binds a rural community.

Last month I beheld something extraordinary. On the outskirts of the Cotswolds, I stood with Lady Sophie Scruton, who was losing an afternoon of hunting to be my guide for the day. And we watched as the members of one of England’s finest hunts, the Vale of White Horse, gathered under a cloudless sapphire sky and prepared to set off across the landscape. It was a glorious spectacle.

We had driven through ironstone villages where rustic bridges straddled undisturbed streams, and as we travelled the secret was disclosed to me that, hidden but defiant, old England still exists in concealed corners. There remains the treasured land that our ancestors knew, which yet waits to be uncovered by power-holding bureaucrats and pulverised into a metallic pile for unsettled people. At the hunt meet, around eighty mounted followers quietly greeted each other as paper cups of port wine were handed out to wash down the little sausage rolls that constantly attracted the attention of swarming foxhounds. Foot-followers and locals stood by to admire the exhibition, as people enjoy a magnificent installation in an art gallery. Local farmers on stocky horses and the squirarchy on their giant Irish hunters stood together to trade parochial news. Tiny children on shaggy ponies were dotted about, thrilled to be part of an ancient ritual whose meaning they hardly grasped.

The ability of hunting to bring those of all walks of life and all social standing together has been one of its unique features since its inception in the early 18th century. In fact, hunting was so effective at blurring class distinctions that at times in its early history it was deemed almost scandalous for this very reason. A friend of mine did his doctorate on the ethics of hunting, which produced a wonderful thesis that I took great pleasure from reading. One of the points of interest he uncovered in his research was how, in the new whiggish settlement following the 1688 revolution, the strict class boundaries recently imposed by social-climbing parliamentarians were undermined by the hunt, which routinely brought together the peasantry, tenant farmers, professionals, land-owning squires, and the great aristocracy in a single activity—class-collaboration and solidarity unseen elsewhere in these isles at that time. Moreover, the new whiggish ascendency, so much of which was contingent on the successive and often brutal enclosure acts, was further undermined by the opening up of the countryside on hunt days, when the landscape appeared to be everyone’s again.

As the ‘field’ departed, Sophie took me to a good viewing point where I could watch the first jump of the day. I crouched under a hawthorn bush and observed rider after rider thundering over the hedge like a great cavalry charge. The quiet countryside, where roe deer barked as they skipped through the coverts and woodpigeons cooed overhead, was suddenly transformed into the setting for a baroque marvel. An event that seemed to belong to the ancient world and yet was also timeless, a great equestrian commotion that appeared to fly out of the pages of the Arthurian corpus, invaded the otherwise peaceful Cotswold panorama, making it the setting of a vision that vanished as quickly as it appeared. 

In a 2012 piece originally published in the Daily Telegraph (which can now be found in the wonderful collection of essays edited by Mark Dooley entitled Against the Tide), Roger Scruton puts it better than I ever could when he describes first seeing a hunt in this very part of England:

I first encountered hunting in my early 40s. It was quite by chance that I should be trotting down a Cotswold lane on a friend’s pony when the uninformed centaurs came galloping past. One minute I was lost in solitary thoughts, the next I was in a world transfigured by collective energy. Imagine opening your front door one morning to put out the milk bottles and finding yourself in a vast cathedral in ancient Byzantium, the voices of the choir resounding in the dome above you and the congregation gorgeous in their holiday robes. My experience was comparable. The energy that swept me away was neither human nor canine nor equine but a peculiar synthesis of the three: a tribute to centuries of mutual dependence, revived for this moment in ritual form.

The conservationist and field-sports journalist Charlie Pye-Smith told me that he was once having dinner with Scruton when the hunting philosopher—during a discussion about the looming ban on houndwork—suddenly exclaimed, “If hunting is banned, Shakespeare will be meaningless!” This may have been an exaggeration on Scruton’s part, but certainly it might reasonably be claimed that the war on hunting with hounds renders so much of English culture utterly obscure.

Enter any pub in England, and more likely than not you will still see cheaply framed hunting prints on the walls and porcelain hand pumps decorated with hunting scenes at the bar. From Sir Gawain’s tale to the novels of Trollope and R.S. Surtees, hunting with hounds is woven into our stories, and into who we are as a people. Half a century ago, almost every schoolchild was required to read Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, that Baghdadi Jew’s son cum national poet and country gentleman. It was quite natural in the England of the 1950s that C.S. Lewis, looking for something to which to compare the army of Aslan in Narnia, should use for his simile a fox-hunt:

All the dogs and lions and wolves and other hunting animals were going at full speed with their noses to the ground, and all the others, streaked out for about half a mile behind them, were following as fast as they could. The noise was like an English fox-hunt.

What might this passage mean when the hunt has finally been exterminated altogether and erased from the national psyche?  And what of the final chapter of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, entitled “The Hunting of the White Stag,” during which the two queens and two kings of Narnia, with a pack of staghounds, pursue a huge white hart into the forest? “Fair Consorts, let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket; for in all my days I never hunted a nobler quarry,” says Peter to his co-rulers. What could such a scene mean to future generations that have lost something as glorious and natural as the hunt—an activity as natural to humans as love-making—once the very thought of it has been entirely bound to the notion of evil in their re-programmed minds?

So integral to our shared culture down the centuries did the hunt become, that perhaps it ought not to surprise us that the oikophobes of modern England, who are set on repudiating our nation and its way of life, are out again to attack it. Those who care nothing for our culture might say, “Well, why does it matter? The most important factor is that hunting is cruel and therefore it must go.” I have addressed the error of this position elsewhere, and I do not care to repeat here the reasons why such contra-cruelty arguments do not hold when it comes to objections to hunting with hounds.

It should be said, however, that on that recent day out in the Cotswold countryside with the Vale of White Horse Hunt, no fox was pursued, no terrier men were present to dig out and dispatch a fox, and an artificial trail had been laid to keep the hound pack off any scent of a fox. As Sophie remarked to me later that day, the only reason why the hunt has continued—having lost its instrumental purpose two decades ago with Tony Blair’s Hunting Act 2004—is because it was never primarily about that instrumental purpose. The hunt was always about community. Perhaps for huntsmen and hunt staff, wildlife management was once a primary concern; but the vast majority of hunt followers—that is, around 99.9% of those involved in hunting—never saw a fox killed, nor had they any desire to do so.

But for those who deride our culture, and want us all turned into rootless, alienated, atomised loci of pure data to be used and harvested by globalist managers who despise belonging because it undermines use, even trail-hunting must be eradicated. For this reason, the Labour Party has announced that if it gets into power next year, which it surely will, it will come after trail-hunting and make moves to outlaw it.

Culture, I am quite certain, is what the war on hunting—and by extension the war on rural life itself—is all about. The war on hunting is not about animal welfare, as the collected evidence indicates that the ban on hunting has been a disaster for wildlife in the UK. Admittedly, for the paramilitary hunt-saboteurs who torment rural people as a hobby, the war on hunting is grounded in their self-righteous and sentimental—and therefore false—conception of virtue. But for the power-holders making decisions about hunting’s future, the war on hunting is a war on our culture, on our inheritance, on who we are. Once one realises that, one soon sees that the war on hunting is just part of a much bigger, ongoing project of deconstructing our culture. At the end of which, I suppose, we will have become what modern elites have in different ways repeatedly claimed Westerners must become: a people who are post-cultural. 

What I saw recently at that gathering of the Vale of White Horse’s members was not some relic of the past, but a living and beautiful community. I witnessed a glorious renewal of a covenant with the land, that common setting that ties an otherwise scattered rural community together. As I contemplated this vision, it struck me how profoundly unjust it is that such a community should have to strive and struggle merely to survive, against the crushing power of those who neither understand their way of life nor have any desire to do so. Let’s hope and pray that whatever comes of next year’s election, it won’t mean the end of this vital part of our shared cultural inheritance.