Elizabethan and Jacobean eras

The Elizabethan and Jacobean eras matter to the book because their falconry writers describe goshawks not simply as difficult birds to be mastered but as wary, responsive companions whose treatment shaped the relationship. Their accounts contrast with later portrayals of female goshawks as irrationally sulky, and help Helen Macdonald reconsider both the bird she is training and the assumptions she has inherited about it.

Goshawks in early falconry writing

In 1615, Simon Latham described goshawks as sociable and familiar, while also shy and fearful by nature. Their wariness was not treated as proof of a bad disposition: Latham connected their reactions to rough handling, and maintained that kindness and consideration could make a goshawk loving toward its keeper. The bird could be both self-willed and responsive, rather than reducible to a single temperament.

Edmund Bert’s account likewise made the falconer responsible for attending to the hawk’s needs and fostering its well-being. He presented the relationship as friendship and play, not only possession or control. The significance of this account lies in its insistence that the bird’s behavior is part of a relationship: how the keeper acts matters to how the hawk responds.

Class and the hierarchy of falconry

The book places falconry within a wider hierarchy of access to land and sport. Falcons required open country to be flown properly, including grouse moors, partridge estates, and broad farmland, resources more readily available to wealthy or well-connected people. Falconry writing could consequently frame possession of the so-called noble falcons as an aristocratic privilege.

Goshawk training occupied a lower-status position in that hierarchy. An austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, was mocked in older writing as graceless, misshapen, and antisocial. The insult attached to the trainer also diminished the hawk: a form of falconry associated with solitary practice and less exclusive access to land was cast as inferior. The distinction therefore reflects not only judgments about birds but judgments about who could hunt, where, and in what company.

A contrast with later stereotypes

Macdonald sets the early accounts against the harsh characterizations she encounters in later falconry books. Those writers describe the female goshawk as sulky, contrary, or exasperating, and treat her difficult behavior as an inborn defect. Reading Latham and Bert offers a different explanation: fear and resistance may follow rough treatment, while patience and consideration can make room for trust and affection.

The contrast does not make the earlier writers free of the gendered language used to describe female hawks. Rather, Macdonald values their recognition of the goshawk as a real, contradictory being, capable of fear as well as boldness and of irritation as well as companionship. She suspects that later falconers’ tendency to pathologize the bird may have been shaped by anxiety about female independence, while acknowledging that this is her interpretation of the change in attitude.

The historical argument tested in practice

The older writing becomes more than a historical curiosity when Macdonald returns to Mabel. After reading accounts that cast goshawks as unplayful and disagreeable, she observes Mabel turning her head upside down, taking a paper ball in her beak, and gently biting and crunching it. Macdonald responds with improvised play, including looking at the hawk through a rolled magazine. Mabel engages, and her raised forehead feathers and rapid tail movements register pleasure. The encounter exposes the limits of the descriptions Macdonald had trusted: the bird’s capacity for play was absent from her expectations because it was absent from the books she had read.

The book thus uses the Elizabethan and Jacobean accounts to reopen a question of interpretation. A hawk’s wariness or refusal need not prove that she is innately vicious or irrational; it can also reveal the conditions of her encounter with a human keeper. This history supports a model of falconry in which attention, kindness, and companionship do not erase wildness, but make a more accurate relationship with it possible.