Game preserve

Game preservation is maintaining a stock of game to be hunted legally. It includes:

Until hand-held guns were invented, sport hunting was largely for the deer or wild boar (by hounds or bow-and-arrow, but Ælfric of Eynsham's Colloquium written in Anglo-Saxon times speaks of the usual way to catch deer being to drive them into a net), or hare (by a fast dog); the Colloquium mentions two stags and a wild boar as a typical day's catch.

What are now called game birds were caught by falconry, or had to be netted or snared or trapped or limed by a fowler employed by the owner of the hunting right. When the fowler used falconry, he seems to have needed to catch and train his hawks; the Colloquium mentions:

Most game preservation and poaching centered on deer.

The arrival of firearms changed bird-hunting. At first birds had to be stalked sitting, but changes in shotgun design in the 18th century made it possible to shoot them flying.

During the 18th and 19th centuries game preservation laws became ever more severe in favour of the rural gentry and their sport shooting rights. Game in Britain was mostly deer, hares, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, and grouse. Game caused much damage to crops, and a persistent complaint among the rural population was not being allowed to kill rabbits and hares to defend crops and garden vegetables. In Scotland farmers dreaded grouse invading ripening cornfields to eat the seeds, and deer in a few nights eating the whole of a crop of turnips intended as winter feed for cattle.

Steady growth of industrial towns in the later 19th century gradually built up a stock of population who when called to court (as magistrates or as jury members) could not be relied on to automatically support the rural gentry's side of court cases. In 1880 pressure from farmers over damage to crops caused by game and hunting led Gladstone's government to pass the Ground Game Act.

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