16th century

The 16th century is evoked as a period in which falconry’s specialized language and equipment carried meanings beyond their practical use. A reference to the Jesuit spy Robert Southwell, who feared discovery because he repeatedly forgot falconry terms, makes technical knowledge a test of belonging: to speak correctly was to signal familiarity with a socially exclusive world. The book’s other references to falconry place that anxiety alongside the histories of elite access, skilled craftsmanship, and attitudes toward hawks.

Falconry and the Language of Belonging

The discussion of falconry vocabulary begins with practical terms for equipment, hawk anatomy, and behavior, including the jesses attached to a trained hawk’s legs. The word jess is traced to French in the 14th century, when falconry was described as a favored game of the ruling elite. The vocabulary’s precision had a social function as well as a practical one: command of it testified to a person’s place in society. The example of Robert Southwell brings that function into the 16th century. His fear that he would be found out because he forgot falconry terms shows how knowledge could serve as a credential—and how failure to perform expertise could expose someone who did not securely belong.

The book sets Southwell’s anxiety beside T. H. White’s later uncertainty, in the 1930s, over what to call a riding implement. The comparison suggests a persistence in falconry’s concern with exact naming, while keeping the historical instances distinct: Southwell’s fear belongs to the 16th century, and White’s to a much later period. For the narrator as a child, by contrast, the terminology was not a social test but an alluring, almost secret language to be mastered.

Equipment, Craft, and Exchange

The 16th century also appears through the description of French falconry hoods made from white kidskin, embroidered with gold thread, and painted with coats of arms. This account presents the hood as both a carefully fashioned piece of equipment and an object that could display status. A later hood examined by the narrator’s companion prompts a broader inventory of hood styles from different regions and periods; the 16th-century French examples belong to this history of varied materials and designs, rather than standing for the entire tradition.

The account also resists treating the hood as an exclusively European invention. It says that Frankish knights learned to use hoods from Arab falconers during the Crusades, and that falconry’s shared appeal made hawks political pawns in those wars. These details connect the specialized equipment to cultural contact and political rivalry. The 16th-century hood is therefore part of a material history in which practical design, visible prestige, and the movement of knowledge across communities intersect.

A Period Within a Changing History

The book’s references to the 16th century sit within a wider chronology of falconry rather than forming a continuous account of life in that period. A 14th-century writer’s contemptuous portrayal of solitary austringers shows that social distinctions around falconry predated the Southwell example. In the 17th century, writers described goshawks in markedly different terms: Simon Latham presented them as shy and fearful but sociable and familiar when treated kindly, while Edmund Bert emphasized friendship between keeper and hawk. Those later accounts contrast with more hostile descriptions quoted from subsequent falconry books, and show that attitudes toward the bird were not fixed across time.

The book also links access to falconry with control of land and social privilege. It observes that flying falcons properly required extensive open country, such as grouse moors, partridge estates, or large farms, resources more readily available to the wealthy or well connected. A discussion of hunting in Maine, where common-law access to land is presented as an egalitarian tradition, supplies a later contrast with the exclusions described in Britain and elsewhere. Read against these comparisons, the 16th-century references help locate falconry within a history of who could participate, who could claim expertise, and how that expertise was displayed.