Sophie Gee

hierarchical social order in late medieval and Renaissance Britain, they also taught you how to write and speak and become a rhetorician.

So to become a gentleman, to become a member of the upper middle and upper classes, the gentry classes, to assume the authority of the nation.

And one could go on about this, but I suppose the point I want to make and what's so brilliant about A Cursed Draw for a Knave is that this art of training birds for sport, which is a very courtly art, it's an art, you know, very closely connected to the upper classes.

to the king, to the king's retinue, to the maintaining of that kind of monarchical power across centuries in Britain.

Barry Hines uses it as a kind of resistance sport.

It becomes this way that this boy growing up around the pits, growing up in a colony of family on a housing estate, these houses were built quickly, cheaply.

They popped up all over the place in the Yorkshire countryside over the period of about 100 years.

It was sort of semi-impermanent housing for mining families.

This child who grows up in these circumstances turns to falconry as his mechanism of survival.

And there's something particularly delightful about it once you know more about the historic role that falconry would have played in the English imagination as this sport of the court, the sport of the aristocracy.

Yeah, this is a, it's actually a really important strain all through English writing from, well, the Renaissance period onward.

This idea of the sort of hunted becoming the hunter, the prey becoming the predator.

We see it come up, you know, in lots of Renaissance writing.

It comes up in Shakespeare all the time.

And then it comes up really brilliantly in one of the great novels of the 18th century, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.

We actually had a little shout out to Tom Jones in the Tom Brown school days.

Because we said that the very first boarding school story ever written in England was written by Henry Fielding's sister, Sarah.

Well, Henry Fielding has an extended riff in Tom Jones in which the most heroic characters are the characters who refuse to obey the game laws and they poach.

wild birds from the aristocratic estates, not caring about the fact that it was actually a hanging offence in the 18th century.

So the reason I'm saying this is that in literature, the assumption of these sports that are supposed to be reserved for aristocrats only is a really important trope of resistance.