THE FINEST HUNTING MANUSCRIPT EXTANT
❧ WRITTEN BY W. A. BAILLIE-GROHMAN ❧
WHEN the burly Landsknechte stormed the walls of the deer park and therewith won the hard-fought battle of Pavia, one of the treasures they captured in Francis’s sumptuous gold-laden tents was a vellum Codex of folio size, almost every leaf of which bore beautifully illuminated pictures of hunting scenes. We know from other evidence that this precious volume was one of the favourite books of the luxury-loving French king, and the fact that he took it with him to the Italian wars in preference to a printed copy, infinitely more portable, such as had been turned out in three different editions by the hand-presses of Antoine Verard, Trepperel, and Philippe le Noir, is a further proof that Francis’s love for finely illuminated manuscript was a ruling passion with him. It is this very MS. which forms the subject of these lines, and the facsimile reproductions, which the writer obtained permission to have executed by competent hands, show the rare skill of the fifteenth-century miniaturist of whose identity we unfortunately know but little. ¶The history of this Codex is an extremely interesting one and well worth the research expended upon it by Gaucheraud, Joseph Lavallée, Werth, and others. The eighty-five chapters are written in a wonderfully regular and perfect hand, and the ink is today as black and clean of outline as it was four and a half centuries ago. The author of what is unquestionably the most beautiful hunting manuscript extant was Count Gaston de Foix, the oft-cited patron of Froissart. This great noble and hunter began the book on May Day 1387, and we know that it was completed when a fit of apoplexy, after a bear hunt, cut short his remarkable career four years later, when he was in his sixty-first year. Of the forty, or possibly forty-one, ancient copies of this hunting book that have come down to us, one or two were written it is almost certain during the author’s lifetime, though the original itself, which was dedicated by Gaston to ‘Phelippes de France, duc de Bourgoigne,’ disappeared in a mysterious manner from the Escurial during the eventful year of 1809, and has not turned up since. None of the other contemporary copies have illuminations at all comparable to those in our MS., for the simple reason that it was not until some decades later that art had reached, even in France, the brilliancy that our illuminations show. For although Argote de Molina—who in his ‘Libro de la Monteria,’ published in Seville in 1582, describes the lost original—says ‘el qual se vee illuminado de excelente mano,’ it is safe to say that, could we place the original side by side with the MS. of which we are speaking, its illuminations would be found to be far inferior to those in the MS. owned by Francis I. ¶ Very likely the lost original MS. was written by one or the other of the four secretaries Froissart tells us were constantly employed by Count de Foix. These he did not call John, or Gautier, or William, but nicknamed them ‘Bad-me-serve,’ or ‘Good-for-nothings.’ The illuminations were probably the work of some wandering master-illuminator attracted to the splendid court at Orthéz by the Count’s well-known prodigal liberality. ¶ Gaston de Foix, to interrupt for a brief spell our tale, was the lord of Foix and Béarn; buffer countships at the foot of the Pyrenees—the castle of Pau was one of Foix’s strongholds. He succeeded, as Gaston III, at the age of twelve to his principalities. Two years later he was serving against the English, and shortly afterwards was made ‘Lieutenant de Roi’ in Languedoc and Gascony, and at the age of eighteen he married Agnes daughter of Philip III King of Navarre. His person was so handsome, his bodily strength so great, his hair of such sunny golden hue, that he acquired the name of Le Roi Phoebus or Gaston Phoebus, by which latter both he and his hunting book have gone down to posterity.
STRIPPING THE BOAR
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.
⇒
LARGER IMAGE
The oldest copy that is extant is preserved in the same treasure-house that contains our MS. and some fourteen other copies of it, namely the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It bears the number 619 (anc. 7,098), while our MS. is numbered f.fr. 616 (anc. 7,097), and if P. Paris MSS. Franc. V 217 is right, it was Gaston’s working copy. The pictures in this MS. are shaded black-and-white drawings, and are not illuminations. That its origin was the south of France is proved, as M. Joseph Lavallée says, by the spelling of certain words: car being spelt guar, baigner as bainher, montagne as montainhe, a manner peculiar in the fourteenth century to the langue d’Oc. The fact that in the MS. 616 these words are spelt in the more modern fashion supports the theory, according to the last-mentioned authority, that it was written at a later date, i.e. in the first half of the fifteenth century, thus confirming the impression already produced by the far superior illuminations in MS. 616. These latter, as we see by a glance at the two full-page reproductions, somewhat reduced in size though they necessarily had to be to find space in this place, evince the unmistakable signs of having been created during a period of transition in the miniaturist’s art. For while the one has the characteristic diapered background, the other has a more realistic horizon, which betokens a later origin than the beginning of the fifteenth century. Of the eighty-seven illuminations in our MS. 616, only four have a natural horizon as background, the rest are diapered in the conventional older manner, in the invention of which the miniaturists of the fourteenth century developed a perfectly wonderful ingenuity, and of which this exquisite Codex is one of the most remarkable examples. ¶ In the opinion of some experts the illuminations in MS. 616 are by the hand of the famous Jean Foucquet, born about 1415, who was made painter and valet-de-chambre to Charles VII. Amongst the choicest works of this artist rank, it is perhaps hardly necessary to mention, the Book of Hours that he executed for Estienne Chevalier, Charles VII’s Treasurer, another Hours which he made for the Duchess Marie of Cleves, and most famous of all the ninety miniatures of the Boccaccio of Estienne Chevalier which is one of the principal treasures of the Royal Library in Munich. Those who are acquainted with Count Bastard’s monumental work will probably discover a distinct resemblance between one of his reproductions, especially in the foliage and scroll work, and the two full-page pictures now before the reader. On the other hand, the opinion of such a painstaking critic as is Levallée deserves attention. According to him—and nobody expended more time and trouble in Gaston Phoebus researches—the illuminations are not by Foucquet’s hand, but possibly by an artist of his school. If they are Foucquet’s, they cannot have been executed before 1440, or at the earliest 1435. ¶ And now to return to the romantic history of our Codex. On one of the front leaves is painted a large coat-of-arms. It is that of the Saint-Vallier family, and two events connected with the then possessors of this precious manuscript throw a telling sidelight upon French social conditions at the period to which the opening scene on Pavia’s bloody field has introduced us. A generation before that event, namely in 1477, Jacques de Brézé, a rich noble of well-known sporting proclivities, returning suddenly home found his wife in a compromising position with a young noble. Swords flashed on slighter provocation than this one in those days, and the angry husband killed both the lover and his wife without further ado. Unhappily for him, the latter was no less a personage than Charlotte of France, natural daughter of Charles VII, and it cost the stern husband a fine of 100,000 ducats, a huge sum in those days, and a couple of years’ confinement in a castle to save his life. The eldest of the six children who were made motherless by this event subsequently married Diane of Poitiers, who not long afterwards became the all-powerful mistress of Francis I, and later on of Henry II, his son. Now Diane de Poitiers was the daughter of Jean de Poitiers, Sieur of Saint-Vallier, on whom his King (Louis IX) had bestowed the hand of his natural daughter Marie. The Codex whose reproductions we have before us had been given, probably as part of the King’s dower, to Jean de Poitiers’s wife, hence the armorial bearings. If we want to become acquainted with the circumstances that probably were the cause of its presence in King Francis’s tents on the eventful day of Pavia, we have to turn to another tragic event which occurred two years before Pavia. In 1523 Jean de Poitiers involved himself in the Connétable de Bourbon’s conspiracy, and the discovery by the King’s minions, among Jean’s secret papers, of the code treacherously used by the Connétable in his correspondence with Charles V of Germany, sent Jean speedily to the scaffold. He was in the act of kneeling down to receive the deathblow when the pardon obtained by his daughter from her royal lover, the King, saved his life. But all his goods and chattels were confiscated by Francis I, and amongst them was most probably our Codex, and thus it came to form part of the vast booty captured by Emperor Charles’s rough-handed Landsknechte. ¶ These formidable soldiers, who, under their giant leader, Georg von Frundsberg, had performed in the Italian campaigns deeds of great prowess—they were really the first trained infantry—were recruited almost exclusively in Tyrol, and for this reason it is not surprising that the next authentic news we have of our Codex is from that country. Bishop Bernard of Trent purchased it evidently from some returning booty-laden Landsknecht, and, recognising its great value, he presented it about the year 1530 to Archduke Ferdinand, Duke of Tyrol, one of the greatest collectors of his time, whose museum and library at his castle Ambras, near Innsbruck, was the wonder of the day. ¶ It remained in the possession of the Hapsburgs for about 130 years, when victory returned it once more to the country from whence defeat had removed it. During Turenne’s campaign in the Netherlands, General the Marquis of Vigneau became possessed of the volume—how remains unfortunately a mystery—and on his return to Paris presented it, July 22, 1661, to his King, Louis XIV. Bishop Bernard’s and General Vigneau’s dedications to the respective royalties are inscribed on the fly leaves, the former, in the shape of a long-winded Latin ‘humblest offering,’ taking up a good deal of space, though, unlike the Frenchman’s dedication, it fails to indicate the year when the presentation was made. ¶ Louis XIV deposited it in the Royal Library, where it received its librarian’s birthmark, the number 7,097, which it retained down to recent days, when it was rechristened, to be known henceforth, as already stated, as MS. 616. It never should have left those sacred halls, but Louis XIV was no venerator of his own law when it suited him to break it. Regretting his gift to the Library, a few years afterwards he demanded the volume back, and back again he got it, his son, the Count of Toulouse, becoming the next owner of it. From him it passed to Orleans princes until, in the fateful year 1848, it formed part of the private library of Louis Philippe at Neuilly, when that royal residence was plundered and fired by the populace.
HUNTING THE FALLOW BUCK
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.
⇒
LARGER IMAGE
By a wonder it escaped complete destruction on that occasion, and though the covers were badly damaged and blood-bespattered, the inside of the book was left intact. Although a new cover of somewhat gaudy modernity has been supplied to it in consequence of the fiery ordeal through which it had passed, the student visiting the great Paris library, where this unique Codex is exhibited in what is known as the Reserve, will find its vellum leaves in very much the same perfect condition as they were when Diane de Poitiers and Francis I turned them over with the care that is bestowed upon a work one loves. ¶ Another fine copy of Gaston Phoebus is preserved in the late Duc d’Aumale’s magnificent library at Chantilly, now the property of the French nation. When recently making some researches there the writer came across a pathetic little note in the late Duke’s catalogue respecting our Codex, which, as we have heard, belonged to the House of Orleans for upwards of a century. It occurs where the Duc d’Aumale speaks of the MS. 616, and it runs: ‘Saved from the conflagration of 1848, it was taken to the Bibliothèque Nationale, but our appeals for a return of the volume addressed to the Conservateurs of the Library were rejected, however well founded we considered our claim!’ The miniatures in the Chantilly copy are finely drawn, but evince in some instances a grotesqueness which is absent from those adorning MS. 616. Thus the much suffering reindeer comes in for some exceedingly quaint limning, with antlers of perfectly ludicrous proportions and a coat like an Angora goat’s. ¶ One curious fact obtrudes itself upon our notice as we examine the illumination in almost all the Gaston Phoebus copies that are adorned with illuminations (the majority of the existing forty MSS. are not illuminated, or at best only with very inferior pictures). It is the bright colours of the huntsmen’s dress in the fifteenth century. With the exception of the wild-boar hunters, who are generally garbed in grey costumes, mounted and unmounted hunters engaged in the pursuit of the stag, buck, bear, otter, fox, wild cat, wolf, hare, and badger, wear with curious promiscuousness blue, scarlet, mauve, white, and yellow costume quite as often as they appear in the more orthodox green-coloured dress. It may possibly have been merely an instance of artistic licence on the part of the miniaturists, for according to the text grey and green were the only colours of venery known to the good veneur. ¶ To come to the contents of our MS. we can introduce it by the broad statement that Gaston Phoebus is the first mediaeval hunting-book in prose that does not deal with the subject in the catechism-like form of question and answer. The few previous prose works that have come down to us take the form of questions asked by the keen young apprentice and answered by his instructor, an experienced veneur, explaining to him the A B C of venery. Some bits in Gaston’s Livre de Chasse are borrowed from Roy Modus, written about sixty years earlier, some from Gace de la Buigne (or Vigne), King John’s first chaplain, written less than thirty years earlier, and a few from La Chace dou Serf, a poetic effusion of the second half of the thirteenth century. But taking it as a whole Gaston Phoebus is unquestionably as original as could be any work upon such a popular subject as hunting then was. ¶ To those who know their Froissart, Count Gaston de Foix’s personality will be very familiar; but, considering that the chronicler’s visit occurred in 1388, the year after the commencement of the Livre de Chasse, it is somewhat strange, in view of his long stay and intimate intercourse at the Count’s court, that he does not mention the opus upon which his host was then engaged. ¶ The prologue mirrors in a characteristic manner the spirit of the age, as does also the last miniature in MS. 616, which represents the noble sportsman in an attitude of beatitude kneeling in a chapel. That Gaston was a pious lord we can see by the score or so of Latin prayers said to have been composed by him in the dire hour of mortal distress after the tragic death of his only son by his—the father’s—hand. ‘By the Grace of God’ Count Gaston speaks wisely and well of the good qualities that a hunter should have, and how hunting causeth a man to eschew the seven deadly sins, concluding his homily with a sentiment that appeals to the sportsman of the twentieth century as much as it did to him of the fourteenth. ‘And also, say I, that there is no man who loves hunting that has not many good qualities in him, for they come from the nobleness and gentleness of his heart of whatsoever estate he be, great lord or little, poor or rich.’ ¶ The prologue once finished, Gaston starts with zest on his task, beginning with the stag, or, to be quite correct, with the ‘nature’ of what was considered in all Continental hunting the most important beast of venery. The next thirteen chapters deal respectively in a similar way with the natural history of the reindeer, the fallow deer, the ‘bouc,’ under which the ibex and the chamois were included, the roe-deer, the hare, the rabbit, the bear, the wild boar, the wolf, the fox, the badger, the wild cat, and the otter. ¶ Following these fourteen chapters, we get ten very interesting ones on the various kinds of sporting hounds, their training, treatment when ill, the construction and management of the kennel, and other details relating to the subject. In Gaston’s time there were five kinds; the first is the Alaunt, which he subdivides into the Alaunt gentle and the Alaunt veautres; the second is the levrier or greyhound; the third the chien courant or running hound; the fourth the bird dog or espainholz, from which the modern spaniel has sprung; and the fifth the mastin or mastiff. Then come two chapters on how to make nets, and how to blow and trumpet, followed by eighteen chapters on how to track the stag and the wild boar, and how to judge of their presence, size, age, etc., by the various signs known to the veneur, who made a very exact science of what we would call woodcraft. The next fifteen chapters relate to the chase proper of the fourteen beasts named at first, with a double chapter on the chase of the wild boar. The concluding twenty-six chapters deal with the various manners of netting, snaring, trapping, and poisoning of wild beasts of prey and other less noxious animals. They are mostly short chapters, and in more than one place the author displays his unwillingness to deal with matter that a good sportsman need have no ken of, except in so far as was necessary to keep down vermin and destroy ‘marauders of the woods’ for the benefit of his legitimate quarry. ¶ Certain historians have called Gaston Phoebus a ‘cruel voluptuary,’ and no doubt some of his repressive measures sound unnecessarily harsh, not to say merciless, in these soft times; but the spirit in which he wrote his famous book is unquestionably that of a really good sportsman who abhors all underhand advantages that curtail the hunted beast’s chances, and who takes his bear or wild boar single-handed, and pursues his stag to a finish, be the forest a trackless maze, and the river to which the hunted deer finally takes a swift flowing stream, into which to plunge is but a minor incident of an exciting sport. ¶ Of the forty or forty-one ancient MS. copies of Gaston Phoebus that are known to exist in Europe to-day, twenty-one are in France, fifteen keeping our MS. 616 company on the shelves of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Five form part of the Vatican Library, and six adorn the principal libraries of Continental capitals. Of the eight copies that are or were in England one is in the British Museum, and two form part of the well-known collection formed in the first half of the last century by the late Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bt., a bibliophile as wealthy as he was discerning. Of these two MSS., No. 11,592 is an incomplete late copy of little value; but the other MS., 10,298, is on the other hand a treasure of great value. Of all the Continental and English copies that the writer has examined this one contains, next to those in MS. 616, the finest miniatures. It is less carefully written, and there are some variations, but nothing of importance so far as is known, though it has never been carefully collated with the best French copies.
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.
FROM THE GASTON PHOEBUS MS.
The British Museum copy of Gaston Phoebus, catalogued as Addit. MS. 27,699, is on vellum, quarto, written in the first half of the fifteenth century. The miniatures are by an indifferent hand, and have been left in an unfinished state, the miniaturist having apparently expended most of his time, and nearly all his bright colours and shining gold, upon the diapering of the backgrounds. It was bought at the Yemeniz Sale in Paris, in May 1867, for something less than £400. The Ashburnham Library contained two copies, both early ones, and of these MS. App. 179 is interesting on account of an hitherto unknown treatise on hawking and birds being added at the end of the hunting book, which is incomplete, and the spaces at the head of each chapter for the usual miniatures are left blank. It was bought at the fourth Ashburnham Sale in May 1899 by the writer. ¶ Of the copy which Werth and Lavallée quote as being in the possession of a Cambridge Library, it is regrettable that no information could be obtained by them or by myself. As a rule the lot of the student making researches of this sort in English libraries, always excepting, of course, the British Museum and the Bodleian, is not a happy one. Not only is study in the libraries discouraged, and letters of inquiry are left unanswered, but valuable MSS. seem to get mislaid, lost, or stolen, rather more frequently than should be. The two remaining copies of Gaston Phoebus in this country, one being in a public museum, the other in a well-known ducal library, have shared this fate, and their whereabouts are unknown. The latter copy must have been a very beautiful MS., for it is described in Dibdin’s Decameron, Vol. III, p. 478, and was bought in 1815 for £161, then a large sum, by Loché; and according to Werth (Altfranzösische Jagdlehrbücher, 1889, p. 70) it was, when he wrote, in the Duke of Devonshire’s library, from which, however, it seems to have disappeared, for no trace of it can be found. Curiously enough, this fate is shared by yet another valuable hunting MS., which for the English student has even greater interest, namely, one of the few existing copies (nineteen all told) of the Duke of York’s translation of Gaston Phoebus, which has disappeared from a well-known nobleman’s library. ¶ In conclusion, it is necessary to say a few words respecting the subject matter of the MS. just mentioned, for many erroneous impressions regarding it are abroad. Gaston Phoebus deals with some animals that were not found in England in Plantagenet times, e.g. the reindeer, the ibex and chamois, and the bear. Hence when Edward, second Duke of York, who filled the position of Master of Game at the court of his cousin, Henry IV, made a translation of his famous contemporary’s hunting book, he took only those parts of it which related to game and dogs found in England, and added five original chapters, calling the whole ‘The Master of Game.’ This book is the oldest hunting book in English, but has never been published. The writer’s reproduction of it, illustrated by photogravure copies of the illuminations in the Paris Codex MS. 616, some of which are reproduced in the present article, is now going through the press.[2] It will, it is hoped, fill a gap in English hunting literature, and remove numerous misconceptions concerning this subject.