Feral state

Feral state is the return to wildness that gave T. H. White a vision of freedom at a moment when he feared the collapse of the world around him. In Helen Macdonald’s account, the lost goshawk that inspired him is both a bird described as recovering an independent life and a figure onto which White projected his desire to escape constraint. The idea also sits within a longer history of falconry in which class and gender shaped how people judged hawks and the people who trained them.

White’s encounter with the idea

As war seemed increasingly imminent, T. H. White’s fears gathered around nightmares of bombs, poison gas, tunnels, and escape. He imagined modern civilization as fragile and doomed, and wanted to run from it, perhaps by retreating into the past. Reading a falconry book by Captain Gilbert Blaine, he found an account of a goshawk that had been lost after living in domestic conditions. Within a week, according to the account, the bird had returned to a feral state and thereafter became a local myth and legend.

The bird’s change gave White a language for a change he wanted for himself. The word feral joined, in his imagination, with ferocious and free, and with associations of the fey and fairy. He took a farm-labourer’s cottage for five shillings a week and wrote to Germany for a goshawk. The decision was not simply to acquire a bird: White hoped that training it would also teach him, and that writing about the effort would pass on an ancient art. He imagined himself flying the hawk and living from the pheasants it caught, a survivor removed from the metropolitan life and schoolroom conflicts he wanted to leave behind.

A projection of escape and mastery

For White, the lost goshawk became a compelling figure of self-transformation. Helen Macdonald describes him finding in the bird elements of himself he had pushed away, including his sexuality and his desire for cruelty and mastery. He held to the hawk as to a possible route out of his former life, even while recognizing that it might hurt him. His intended relationship with it therefore carried a tension: the bird promised freedom from constraint, yet White also meant to train and control it.

The account gives this longing a historical pressure. White’s imagined refuge took shape against war, political power, and the threatened destruction of civilization. His wished-for life as a rural survivor was not a neutral retreat into nature; it depended on the hawk’s capacity to hunt and on White’s ambition to make the bird both a companion and an instrument of survival. Feral state names the wildness he longed for, but his plan to reach it was bound to human purpose and control.

The social history of hawks and falconers

Macdonald places the idea against falconry’s class distinctions. Falcons were celebrated as noble and superior birds, but flying them properly required access to open country such as grouse moors, partridge estates, and extensive farmland—resources more readily available to the wealthy and well connected. Captain Gilbert Blaine described possession of noble falcons as an aristocratic privilege. The goshawk, by contrast, could be flown in more confined spaces, but both it and the solitary austringer who trained goshawks and sparrowhawks received contemptuous treatment in some historical writing.

That hierarchy makes the goshawk’s return to wildness resonate beyond White’s personal hopes. The bird he found in Blaine’s account had escaped domestic life, while the historical reputation of goshawks had been shaped by assumptions about roughness, solitude, and social rank. Macdonald shows that descriptions of the bird were never only neutral accounts of its nature: they also carried judgments about the people associated with it and about who had access to the more prestigious forms of falconry.

Changing accounts of the goshawk

Macdonald further contrasts later descriptions of the goshawk as sulky, difficult, or irrational with seventeenth-century accounts. Simon Latham described goshawks as shy and fearful but also sociable and familiar, particularly when treated kindly. Edmund Bert presented the falconer as responsible for meeting the hawk’s needs and described a relationship of friendship and companionship. These accounts acknowledged the bird as self-willed and contradictory without reducing its behavior to a defect of temperament.

This contrast reframes feral state. The hawk’s independence is not simply a romantic escape from human life, nor is its difficulty evidence that it is a defective creature. Its responses depend partly on how it is treated, while the human desire to make it manageable can reproduce the very control from which the idea of wildness seems to promise release. Macdonald’s account thus holds together the goshawk’s actual independence, White’s projection of freedom onto it, and the human histories that determine whether such a bird is admired, feared, or dismissed.