Valley of the Severn, near Willey

A simple reading of the history of the earth is sufficient to show that hunting is as old as the hills—not figuratively, but literally; and that the hunter and the hunted, one furnished with weapons of attack, and the other with means of defence, have existed from the earliest periods of creation to the present. That is, the strong have mastered the weak, and in some instances have fallen side by side, as we see by their remains. In the economy of Nature, the process of decay appears to have been the exception, rather than the rule; with beak or tooth, or deadly claw, the strong having struck down the less defended in a never-ending arena. What a hunting field, in one sense, the Old World must have been, when creatures of strange and undefined natures infested the uncertain limits of the elements, and what encounters must have taken place in the ooze and mud periods, when monsters, enormous in stature and stretch of wing, were the implacable hunters of the air, the water, and the slime! Nor can the inhabitants of the earth, the water, and the air, taking the term in its broad rather than in its technical sense, be said to be less hunters now, or less equipped with deadly weapons. Some have supernumerary teeth to supply the loss of such as might get broken in the fray. One strikes down its prey at a blow, another impales its victims on thorns, and a third slays by poison. Some hunt in company, from what would seem to be a very love of sport—as crows and smaller birds give chase to the owl, apparently rejoicing in his embarrassment, at break of day.

We need but refer to those remotely removed stages of human life illustrated by drift beds, bone caves, and shell heaps—to those primitive weapons which distinguished the lowest level of the Stone Age, weapons which every year are being brought to light by thousands—to give the genus homo a place among the hunters; indeed one of the strongest incentives which helped on Pre-historic Man from one level to the other through the long night of the darkest ages, appears to have been that which such a pursuit supplied. To obtain the skins of animals wilder than himself he entered upon a scramble with the wolf, the bear, and the hyena. Driven by instinct or necessity to supply wants the whole creation felt, his utmost ingenuity was put forth in the chase; and in process of time we find him having recourse to the inventive arts to enable him to carry out his designs. On the borders of lakes or on river banks, in caverns deep-seated amid primeval forest solitudes, he fashioned harpoons and arrow-heads of shell, horn, or bone, with which to repulse the attack of prowlers around his retreat and to arrest the flight of the swiftest beast he required for food; and when he emerged from the dark night which Science has as yet but partially penetrated, when he had succeeded in pressing the horse and the dog into his service, and when the cultivation of the soil even had removed him above the claims of hunger, he appears equally to have indulged the passion—probably for the gratification it gave and the advantages it brought in promoting that tide of full health from which is derived the pleasing consciousness of existence.

Tradition, no less than archÆology and the physical history of the country itself, lead us to suppose that when those oscillations of level ceased which led to the present distribution of land and water, one-third of the face of the country was covered with wood and another with uncultivated moor, and that marsh lands were extensive. Remains dug up in the valley of the Severn, and others along the wide stretch of country drained by its tributaries, together with those disinterred from the bog and the marsh, show that animals, like plants, once indigenous, have at comparatively recent periods become as extinct as Dodos in the Mauritius. Old British names in various parts of the country, particularly along the valley of the Severn, exist to show that the beaver once built its house by the stream, that the badger burrowed in its banks, and that the eagle and the falcon reared their young on the rocks above. At the same time, evidence exists to show that the bear and the boar ranged the forests as late as the conquest of England by the Normans, whilst the red deer, the egret and the crane, the bittern and the bustard, remained to a period almost within living memory.

River loams, river gravels, lake beds, and cave breccias, disclose hooks and spears, and sometimes fragments of nets, which show that hunting and fishing were practised by the primitive dwellers along river plains and valleys.

The situations of abbeys, priories, and other monastic piles, the ruins of which here and there are seen along the banks of rivers, and the records the heads of these houses have left behind them, lead us to suppose that those who reared and those who occupied them were alive to the advantages the neighbourhood of good fisheries supplied. Some of the vivaries or fish-pools, and meres even, which once afforded abundant supplies, no longer exist, their sites being now green fields; but indications of their former presence are distinct, whilst the positions of weirs on the Severn, the rights of which their owners zealously guarded, may still be pointed out. Sometimes they were subjects of litigation, as with the canons of Lilleshall, who claimed rights of fishing in the Severn at Bridgnorth, and who obtained a bull from Pope Honorius confirming them in their rights. In 1160 the Abbot of Salop, with the consent of his chapter, is found granting to Philip Fitz-Stephen and his heirs the fishery of Sutton (piscarium de Sutana), and lands near the said fishery. These monks also had fisheries at Binnal, a few miles from Willey; and it is well known that they introduced into our rivers several varieties of fish not previously common thereto, but which now afford sport to the angler.

Fishing, it is true, may have been followed more as a remunerative exercise by some members of these religious houses, still it did not fail to commend itself as an attractive art and a harmless recreation congenial to a spirit of contemplation and reflection to many distinguished ecclesiastics. That the Severn of that day abounded in fish much more than at present is shown by Bishop Lyttleton, who takes some pains to describe it at Arley, and who explains the construction of the coracle and its uses in fishing, the only difference between it both then and now, and that of early British times, being that the latter was covered with a horse’s hide.A jury, empannelled for the purpose of estimating the value of Arley manor upon the death of one of its proprietors, gave the yearly rental of its fishery at 6s. 8d.,—a large sum in comparison with the value of sixty acres of land, stated to have been 10s., or with the rent of a ferry, which was put down at sixpence. There must have been fine fishing then. Trout were plentiful, so were salmon; there were no locks or artificial weirs to obstruct the attempts of fish—still true to the instinct of their ancestors—to beat the tide in an upward summer excursion in the direction of its source. The document states that the part of the river so valued “abounded in fish.”

Note.—The Bishop of Worcester, by his regulations for the Priory of Little Malvern, in 1323, enjoins the prior not to fish in the stew set apart from ancient times for the recreation of the sick, unless manifest utility, to be approved by the Chapter, should sanction it; in which case he was, at a fit opportunity, to replace the fish which he caught.

We fancy it is not difficult to recognise a growing feeling against that separation of religion, recreation, and health which unfortunately now exists, and in favour of re-uniting the three; and we are persuaded that the sooner this takes place the better for the nation.