THE CHASE AND THE ROAD.
[After H. Alken.
It was about 1750 that Hugo Meynell, the “Father of Fox-hunting,” purchased Quorn Hall and established the hounds, and he hunted and he halloed for forty-eight years over a huge stretch of country from Market Harborough to the Trent—more than thirty miles across—so that there was scarce a bullfinch whose rails his horses’ hoofs had not scraped in all this hunting territory. He knew the muddy bottom of many a ditch and had been soused in every stream before his hunting days were done and his son succeeded him as Master for a brief two years. Meynell not only established the Hunt, but made it pre-eminent, and Quorn was then—what with the lavish hospitality he dispensed at the Hall, and with the many hunting men who took up their quarters here—what Melton Mowbray is now, the metropolis of hunting. The village—or little town that it was for gaiety—was in fact too lively and too expensive for some, and it was this too great success that led to Melton arising in its stead: an old-time sportsman discovering the then unknown sleepy old market-town and establishing himself there, for quiet and economy. Hunting men who have ridden to hounds in Leicestershire any time during the last sixty years or more will smile at the association of Melton with cheapness. Our exploratory sportsman of long ago had, however, made a great discovery. He found that Quorndon being in the centre of the Quorn Hunt, you must hunt, unless you be exceptionally energetic, almost exclusively with that pack; whereas from Melton, that town standing in the marches of other hunts, you might be loyal to your old love and yet take the field, day in and day out, with the Belvoir and the Cottesmore as well. And thus the fame and fortune of Melton grew.
THE QUORN HUNT
This is no place to tell of the glories of the Quorn Hunt under Assheton-Smith, or Osbaldiston—“The Squire,” as every one loved to call him; or the further splendours under Sir Richard Sutton, who, when asked why he hunted seven days a week, replied, “Because I can’t hunt eight.” The annals of the Hunt are extensive and the gossip endless, ranging through the whole gamut of sentiment: rising to Homeric laughter and sinking to the depths of mysticism, as when the older villagers tell you of the story, elderly when even they were young, of how Dick Burton, the huntsman, died and was buried in Quorndon churchyard, and how the hounds killed a fox on his grave at the close of the next hunting day.
The interior of Quorndon church is beautiful and exquisitely kept, particularly the Farnham Chapel, the property of the ancient Farnham family, seated at Quorndon for many centuries past, and still here. The chapel, only to be entered by favour, is filled with the elaborate monuments of bygone Farnhams, of which the most notable is that to John Farnham, Gentleman Pensioner to Queen Elizabeth, who died in 1587. He lies in life-sized effigy beside Dorothy his wife, and is habited in armour, with a representation by his side of the axe carried by the honourable corps of which he was a member, whose duties were to form a bodyguard to the Sovereign on public occasions. “Pensioner” appears to be a misleading term, the membership being honorary and entailing expense, rather than bringing payment.
FROM THE MONUMENT TO JOHN FARNHAM.