“Feral, ferocious and free”

“Feral, ferocious and free” is the compact ideal that draws T. H. White toward goshawk training, but it also exposes the tension between wildness and control. In Helen Macdonald’s account, the phrase begins with a lost bird and becomes a way for White to imagine a different life for himself; the broader history of falconry then complicates its apparent promise of freedom.

The phrase and its origin

White encounters the idea while reading Gilbert Blaine’s account of a goshawk that, after being lost, returned to a feral state within a week and became a local legend. The sentence strikes him with the force of revelation: “She reverted to a feral state.” The bird’s transformation offers him a model of escape at a moment when the approach of war intensifies his fear of modern civilization. He takes a cottage for five shillings a week and writes to Germany for a goshawk.

The words gather force through their associations. White links feral with ferocious and free, then extends the chain toward fairy, fey, and ferox. This is not merely a description of an animal living beyond human care. It is an imaginative possibility: a return to a state outside the rules and pressures he finds intolerable. The expression’s rhythm makes that possibility sound like a single condition, though the book shows that its parts pull in different directions: freedom is desired, ferocity is feared and admired, and feralness is something White hopes to approach through training.

White’s projection onto the hawk

The goshawk becomes more than a prospective hunting bird for White. Macdonald interprets it as a living figure for parts of himself he has tried to repress, including his unruliness and desire for mastery. He wants to be free and ferocious, yet he also plans to train the bird, teach it, and write a book about the ancient art. The contradiction is central: he seeks an escape from the constraints of his life by taking responsibility for a powerful animal that he intends to bring under control.

The cottage gives this imagined transformation a concrete setting. White calls the rented house his refuge and makes it his own, painting and varnishing its rooms, filling them with books and furnishings, and turning a guest bedroom into an ornate, romantic space. He spends £66 on deep-pile carpets, yet does not sleep in that room; instead, he uses a camp bed elsewhere. The hawk is to live in the barn. These details make the phrase less a simple celebration of liberation than a wish being built into domestic routines and material surroundings. The bird is expected to become part of a new life, but that life is still organized around his plans for it.

Macdonald identifies the same contradiction in White’s relationship with Gos as a struggle to civilize in the bird the qualities White longs for and resists in himself. White’s hoped-for refuge from the world therefore reproduces a conflict within it: he is drawn to the hawk as an image of feral freedom while trying to make that image answer to training. The expression carries both the attraction of escape and the risk of turning an animal into a vessel for human desire.

Wildness, class, and the making of reputations

Macdonald places White’s ideal against a social history in which falconry’s preferred birds were not judged apart from the people who could fly them. Falcons required open ground for their hunting style, and access to grouse moors, partridge estates, and large stretches of farmland was easier for the wealthy or well connected. Gilbert Blaine described possession of the “noble falcons” as an aristocratic privilege. The language of nobility thus attached a bird’s supposed excellence to the social position of its falconers and to their access to land.

Goshawks, by contrast, could be flown in more varied places, but their trainers received a poorer reputation. Macdonald recalls how historical writing cast the solitary austringer as graceless and socially suspect, while later descriptions made the goshawk itself sound violent, disagreeable, and difficult. Such labels help clarify what the expression does and does not mean: “feral” may sound like a direct recognition of wildness, but accounts of birds also reflect the human judgments and social distinctions surrounding their use.

Macdonald’s contrast with hunting in Maine extends the point beyond falconry. There, she describes a tradition in which common-law access allows people to hunt across the land, without the same pattern of exclusive estates and elite shooting grounds associated with Britain. A 1942 article she recalls contrasted that access with hunting restricted to estate owners and their guests in fascist Italy and Germany, while acknowledging that Britain had a comparable system of land management. The word free therefore has a social dimension as well as an inward, personal one: access to land and hunting is distributed unequally, and the image of freedom depends partly on who is allowed to pursue it.

A counter-image to the feral ideal

Macdonald also challenges inherited accounts of goshawk temperament through her reading of older falconry writing. Seventeenth-century descriptions presented goshawks as shy and fearful but sociable and familiar, and attributed their responses in part to how they were treated. One account described the falconer as the bird’s friend and playfellow. This history offers a different emphasis from the later stereotype of the sulky, irrational hawk: behaviour that irritates a trainer may reflect rough treatment or unmet needs rather than an essentially bad nature.

The difference matters to Macdonald’s own experience with Mabel the goshawk. After a man suggests that the female hawk and her female trainer naturally understand one another, she rejects the idea that their shared sex explains the bird’s behaviour. Reading falconry books, she finds a long tradition that characterizes goshawks through gendered terms such as sulky, flighty, and hysterical. Older writing, by contrast, describes birds that are self-willed and fearful but also capable of affection when treated with consideration. This comparison makes “ferocious” less a neutral fact about goshawks than one possible human interpretation of them.

Across these episodes, the expression remains deliberately unstable. It captures White’s yearning for escape, but the book does not treat the hawk as a simple emblem of the freedom he seeks. A goshawk has its own temperament and needs; a falconer’s account of its wildness is shaped by expectations, handling, and access to the landscape. The phrase’s force lies in that unresolved distance between wanting to become free and trying to train another living creature into the image of freedom.