Calls and cries

The various crucial moments of a successful hunt were marked by shouts and the sounding of the hunting horn. A hunt typically consisted of 40 or 50 foxhounds, followed by the same number of riders on horseback, so it was essential to relay information quickly about what was happening among the whole pack.

If there is one expression that everybody readily associates with the hunt, it is that of "Tally-ho!" This was the cry, translatable in modern parlance as "Game on!", that announced that a fox had broken from its covert (the temporary refuge it had sought when it found its earth, or home, had been stopped up). Sometimes a fox would just lurk in its covert, but that didn’t necessarily protect it from the attentions of the hounds. If it broke free on to open ground, the cry of ‘Tally-ho!’ would go up.

The term would appear to have originated in the 18th century from the French "Taïaut!", first used in deer hunting at least a century earlier. It is probably a corruption of the earlier "Taillis-au!", meaning "To the coppice!", shouted when the hunting party saw a deer running towards a patch of woodland.

A less well-known cry was the evocative "whoo-whoop", articulated at the death of the fox as it was torn and consumed by the hounds. In medieval times, a mournful call on the hunting horn, known as the "mort" (meaning "death"), was sounded at this point. The cry of "whoo-whoop" was perhaps an imitation of this, and later passed into colloquial usage among hunting folk to refer to anything that was at an end, or dead on its feet.

Division of the spoils

If a fox was eventually caught by the hounds, it was generally taken from them by the leading huntsman to be dismembered. Various parts of its anatomy were prized as trophies by members of the hunt. The "brush" (as its tail is known) was particularly esteemed, and used to be presented to the leading rider in the field. However, the urge to be first meant that hunters would often gallop recklessly to the scene of the kill, causing a potential pile-up of horses, so by the early 19th century, the tradition of awarding the brush to the first rider was abandoned.

Anybody who didn’t get the brush might be privileged with one of the other parts to be distributed. The "mask" (head) might make a dramatic piece of taxidermy to put on your shelf or wall, as a token of your first kill, while one of the "pads" (feet) made an interesting twist on the tradition of carrying a rabbit’s foot as a lucky charm.

What remained of the fox’s carcass after the hunt-master’s swift butchery of it would then be tossed to the hounds.

First blood

Perhaps no hunting custom aroused greater distaste among the non-practitioner than that of blooding. This was a celebration of a novice’s (usually a child’s) first successful hunt by daubing the still-warm blood of the ripped animal on his or her face. In recognition that people found this custom a little too earthy to be charming, blooding fell into some disrepute during the 19th century. It was never wholly abandoned, however, and was almost certainly still being practised right up until the hunting prohibition came into effect.

An American historian of English fox-hunting, David C Itzkowitz, writing in 1977, met children who had been blooded at a hunt in Lincolnshire.