Sophie Gee

So what people will notice from that whimsical and lovely description of the hierarchy of hunting birds in 15th century England, in medieval England, is that that too is organised into a very tight hierarchical system, that it's a feudal system, in fact.

And the point that's being made in the Book of St Albans is that the reason that birds have a hierarchy is that humans have a hierarchy too.

And these hierarchies are essential to be kept in

in order to keep the fabric of society orderly and coherent and able to proceed toward a British modernity.

So this is where falconry gets really interesting, I think.

The Book of St Albans is by no means the only really important early modern falconry text from Britain.

So some other excellent titles just to dangle in front of you.

A Jewel for Gentry.

From 1614, The Book of Falconry or Hawking from 1575, Latham's Falconry or The Falcon's Lure and Cure in two books.

That's from 1615.

Then Latham republishes that just a few years later.

There's a whole rash of these falconry books, actually, in the early 17th century before the Civil War.

There's another one called The Gentleman's Recreation, which is a post-Civil War text and gets published to kind of coincide with the restoration of the monarchy and the return to traditional hierarchies and order.

in Britain.

So the thing I'm trying to get at with this potted history of falconry manuals is that they are, on the one hand, they're technical documents.

They're telling people how to train birds to help them hunt for prey.

But they're also artistic manuals.

They're about the art and the craft and the beauty, the skill of training a bird to be a hunter.

And actually one of the sort of notable things about falconry

falconry manuals from the medieval and renaissance period is that the writing itself was often very informed by the rules and regulations of classical rhetoric so that they were often used in renaissance school boys education because they didn't just teach you how to train a bird for hunting purposes and they didn't just teach you and reinforce the idea of a heavily hierarchical