Town vs. Country, Red Coats vs. Foxes

Americans may be forgiven for their confusion over what is going on in Britain these days. Angry protesters have invaded the House of Commons, London has witnessed one of the largest street demonstrations in its history, and tweedy country squires are threatening mass acts of civil disobedience. And these passions have been let loose not by the war in Iraq or by gay marriage, but by, of all things, a debate over fox hunting. The battle, which has been raging for more than a year, may finally have been settled last month when the House of Commons decreed that fox hunting will be illegal after Feb. 18, 2005, in England and Wales. Then again, it may not be over yet; there are the 40,000 fox hunters who have threatened to go fox hunting in protest on Feb. 19.

For Americans seeking to understand the passions surrounding what looks like little more than a quaint survival of a bygone age, the best analogy is gun control. Like guns in the United States, fox hunting pits country people against city dwellers, defenders of “traditional values” against “progressives,” animal lovers against sportsmen and, in Britain, still obsessed with class, the “privileged” against the “people.”

During its golden age in the 19th century, hunting foxes was seen as something that united people, rather than divided them. Fox hunting, claimed John Hawkes in 1808 without a trace of irony, “links all classes together, from the peer to the peasant.”

Unlike pheasants, grouse or trout, which by law could be shot or caught only by those who owned land, foxes -- which were classed as vermin -- could be chased by anyone. Fox hunting mixed local gentry, who could afford to hunt on horseback wearing red coats; farmers, who could come out for the day on their farm horses; and poor people, who might run along on foot or watch from a nearby hill.

Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist who was a keen fox hunter himself despite being so nearsighted that he depended on his horse to see where they were going, wrote a novel whose plot hinges on the inability of a visiting American to understand the significance of fox hunting as a force that bound the rural community together.

But now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the vast majority of the British no longer live in the countryside. The traditions of rural life have seemed under siege for years, and, from the perspective of those who still dwell in the country, the people who now run Britain just don’t understand them. To its supporters, fox hunting is a symbol of the traditions of rural life.

To its opponents, fox hunting symbolizes something else. Oscar Wilde famously described fox hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”

To some people today, fox hunters are “unspeakable” because they torment animals. To others, fox hunters are “unspeakable” because they symbolize the leisured lifestyle of the idle rich, “the privileged minority which for centuries ran this country,” to quote one Labor Party member of Parliament.

This vision, too, has its roots during fox hunting’s Victorian heyday. Although most fox hunts were made up of people with strong ties to the local community, the fox hunters who attracted the most national attention were the wealthy young daredevils who clustered in a few fashionable hunts in the vicinity of the resort of Melton Mowbray. The exploits of the Meltonians, as they came to be known, were described by sports journalists and were eagerly devoured by readers in country houses -- and not a few city ones as well. Their drinking, gambling and sexual escapades also found their way into the popular press. The Meltonians helped make fox hunting fashionable and, by the middle of the 19th century, locals often found themselves crowded out of the field by wealthy outsiders eager to display their glossy horses and red coats.

It is hard to tell whether fox hunting’s demise was most brought about by sympathy for animals, antipathy for the upper classes or just the emergence of an urban culture that is as mystified by the traditions of fox hunting as are most Americans. In the end, I suspect it was a combination of all three. But the story may not be over. There is still Feb. 19 to look forward to.