Ye Olde English Shotgunners

Some of the greatest treasures in the world of shotgunning literature are the works of 19th century English sportsmen. Historically, the 19th century was a remarkable period. The shotgun entered the century as a flintlock, mutated into a percussion lock and finally evolved into the side-by-side breechloader we know today.

Hunting also took place on a grand scale with bag limits quite beyond modern comprehension. Fortunately, the records and observations on shotguns, shotgunning, game and field ethics by the sporting gentry of the day were uniquely precise, and the literary legacy they left behind is as entertaining and informative today as it was 150 years ago.

A number of classics, still available in reprint form, stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. My selections include the 2-volume Badminton Library series authored by Lord Walsingham and Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey titled Shooting: Field and Covert (1889) and Shooting: Moor and Marsh, Captain Lacy’s The Modern Shooter (1842) and Colonel Peter Hawker’s Instructions to Young Sportsmen (10 editions, 1814-1854), as well as Hawker’s remarkable 2-volume diary which details his daily hunting and fishing adventures over a period of 50 years. The following are just a taste of the typical excerpts from Shooting: Field and Covert.

The great party hunts of the 1800’s were driven hunts. Lord Walsingham and Payne-Gallwey explain why

“It is now-a-days generally admitted among those who really know what shooting is, and should be, that driving is the neatest, most skillful and most satisfactory way of killing winged game and that it, above all, gives the birds a chance; for an indifferent shot will not bring them down, and, what is more to the point, will not wound them, as he would be sure to do were they flushed under his nose to fly slowly away.”

And A Tinge Of Snobbery

“Shooting partridges over dogs is very pleasant for men who only care for seeing their pointers work, and ignore the skill of shooting. If partridges lie so close that pointers can be successfully used in finding them, they afford such simple shots that there is little skill required in killing them. The perfection of shooting demands that the game shall spring up wild and so offer a test of true aiming.”

The Skilled Sportsman

“To a true sporting shooter it is not the amount of game he kills, but the way he kills it; and it is a certain fact that those men who get the very best shooting England can afford take more delight in dropping dead a long or difficult shot that in accounting for a hundred easy ones, which would not be the case if they cared only for the quantity of game they bagged.”

Hint To Beginners

“It is better to fire a yard too far ahead of a bird flying, or of ground game running, than to fire an inch too far in its rear. In the former case the shot may meet the mark, in the latter it never can. In the former, if it does count a hit it means one in a vital part, the head; in the latter it means a wound in the extremities.

“The endeavor of every shooter should be to strike his game chiefly in the head and neck. This is to be easily done with winged game by practice, as well as with hare and rabbits.”