ENGLISH FOX HUNTING: A HISTORY. By Raymond Carr.

1976 1st edition. Large 8vo (140 x 222mm). Ppxxi,273. B/w photographic plates, b/w chapter heading vignettes, maps, extensive bibliography. Red boards, spine titled in gilt.

"Many previous histories of fox hunting have described the controversial sport, but this exciting book by Raymon Carr explains it. Dr Carr shows that hunting was originally a royal and aristocratci sport and outside England it so remained. Here, as the fox replaced the more aristocratic deer as quarry, the fox hunting community came to include a wide section of society and depended always on the tolerance or active co-operation of farmers... The history of hunting is, therefore, largely the history of tensions and changes within a cohesive rural society - and in this new paperback edition, Raymond Carr has updated his epilogue to examine a new twist to these tensions with the growing militancy of the hunt saboteurs." Chapters include: Antecedents: techniques and traditions; The slow beginnings c.1500 - c.1750; The birth of modern fox hunting: the Meynellian Sysytem c.1750- 1800; The social foundations, 1700 - 1800; The world of Nimrod: the social geography of early-nineteenth-century fox hunting; Some early masters, 1800 - 1840; The noble science in the railway age; The national sport; Indian summer 1870 - 1914: part I; Indian summer 1870 - 1914: part II; The antis, 1800-1914; Rural tensions, 1800 - 1914; Epilogue, 1914 - 1974. Towards the end of the book is an extensive bibliography listing roughly two hundred books or periodicals mentioned in the text or of related interest with the most interesting or useful highlighted.