17th century

The 17th century is a recurring historical reference point in the book’s account of falconry, not simply a distant setting. Its manuals preserve a different language for goshawks and their keepers from that found in many later writers: they describe birds that are wary and self-willed, yet capable of familiarity, and they present the keeper’s conduct as part of the relationship. Read alongside falconry’s class-bound vocabulary and T. H. White’s training of Gos, these texts complicate the idea that a hawk’s difficult behaviour is an immutable defect.

Falconry, Status, and Language

Falconry’s social distinctions survive in its technical terms. The word jess, for the leather strap attached to a hawk’s anklets, reaches back to the period when falconry was a favourite game of the ruling elite. More broadly, the specialist vocabulary names different parts and stages of a hawk’s life and training. In later centuries, knowing that vocabulary could attest to a person’s place in society; for Helen Macdonald as a child, by contrast, the words seemed like a secret language to be mastered.

The social divide also shaped which birds and forms of falconry were celebrated. Falcons required open ground such as grouse moors, partridge estates, and large expanses of farmland, access more readily available to the wealthy or well connected. Goshawks could hunt from the fist at closer range, making them more practical in varied places. Historical writing nevertheless elevated the aristocratic falconer and peregrine while disparaging the solitary austringer, the trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks. The book uses that contrast to show how judgments about birds were entangled with judgments about their keepers and their access to land.

Goshawks in 17th-Century Writing

The book sets later condemnations of goshawks against earlier descriptions by Simon Latham and Edmund Bert. Writing in 1615, Latham called goshawks sociable and familiar, while also acknowledging that they were naturally shy and fearful. He connected their responses to the keeper’s treatment: roughness could provoke them, whereas kindness and consideration could make them loving companions. Bert likewise presented the keeper as responsible for meeting the hawk’s needs and described the relationship as one of friendship and play.

This account differs sharply from the later language Helen encounters in falconry books, where the goshawk is repeatedly characterized as sulky, contrary, and difficult. The contrast does not make the earlier writers’ claims neutral or free of human interpretation: they, too, describe hawks through the terms of their relationship with a keeper. But their emphasis on the bird’s fearfulness and on the consequences of harsh handling leaves room for its behaviour to be understood as a response, rather than as proof of a defective temperament.

Books, Training, and Historical Imagination

The 17th century reaches into T. H. White’s training of Gos through An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking, Edmund Bert’s 1619 book about goshawks. White had no personal teacher and relied on a small number of books; Bert’s treatise became his principal guide. Its claims about hawks and their keepers were not merely historical background for him. White was drawn to Bert and privately described his feelings as a schoolgirl’s infatuation, then chose to train his hawk in an old-fashioned manner.

That choice shaped White’s vigil with Gos. He interpreted the old method of keeping a hawk awake through continuous watching as a solitary ordeal and a test of endurance, although the earlier practice could involve others taking turns. The book presents this as a revealing gap between historical method and White’s imagined rite of passage: the 17th-century text offered him a model, but his own interpretation turned it into a confrontation between keeper and bird, and with himself.

Later Comparisons

A walk with Mabel in Cambridge gives the historical contrast a practical setting. Earlier writers had explained that carriage—taking a hawk out among changing surroundings—helped accustom her to the world. Helen notes that streets in 1615 would have made a hawk a less remarkable sight than they did in her own time, even though carts, horses, crowds, and dogs could still have frightened a bird. The comparison connects an old training principle to the different social conditions under which it is applied.

The book also places 17th-century falconry against a later account of hunting access in Maine. In a 1942 magazine article, an American hunter contrasted his country’s common-law access to hunting land with restrictions in Britain and in fascist Italy and Germany, while acknowledging that Britain shared the exclusionary system. This comparison does not make the 17th century equivalent to those later settings; it shows instead how land access and privilege recur in the history of hunting, even as the rules and political contexts change.