I would cordially invite any pro-repeal Members of Parliament to wander along to the north bank of Westminster Bridge, next to the Houses of Parliament, where they may care to ponder the statue of Boadicea that was placed there in 1902. I mention this because Mr Roger Helmer, MEP, recently sought to justify blood sports by quoting a line on hare coursing from an obscure work named Cynegeticus, written in AD 180 by Arrian, hardly a name to rank alongside those of Herodotus, Plato or Socrates.
Classical accounts are awash with accounts of bloodletting and wanton cruelty, so it’s hard to see how some fleeting line written over 18 centuries ago, during the dark days of industrialized savagery in the Coliseum, could carry any moral weight in our more enlightened times. If we’re looking for guidance from notable people of this era, then one might as well seriously suggest that all huntsmen who are fond of their steeds follow the precedent set by the emperor Caligula, who chose his horse as his wedding partner and then went on to make it a senator.
So, apart from this one line from the obscure Arrian, who was in any case writing about customs in his homeland, Greece, do the ancients have anything significant to tell us about hares in Britain? Indeed they do, and what they have to say is momentous.
When we read Cassius Dio’s account of Boadicea’s rebellion in AD 60 against the Romans, we learn that this British warrior queen released a hare from the folds of her dress to divine the future from the way it ran off, and this is without the creature being chased or harassed by dogs. The hare bounded away in a favourable fashion, running on the ‘right side’. The assembled tribes were delighted by this, so Boadicea immediately gave thanks to Andraste, the British goddess of Victory. The hare proved to be right, because the historian Tacitus recorded that a statue of the Roman goddess of Victory fell over without any apparent cause, something that terrified the inhabitants of Camulodunum (modern Colchester), and with good reason.
Boadicea destroyed Colchester, then annihilated the Ninth Legion that had been sent to rescue the colony. She then marched on London and destroyed it, and even today there is a layer of burned clay beneath the city, known as the Boudiccan layer, which is all that remains of the Roman city of that time. After that, she turned north once again and destroyed Verulamium, or modern St Albans. Boadicea’s revolt began after the death of her husband, when she was flogged and her young daughters were raped by Roman legionaries, and her rebellion was one of the most serious that Rome had ever faced in its long history.
Three cities were burned to the ground, 80,000 citizens and Roman allies were killed in addition to the destruction of the Ninth Legion, and the revolt was so serious that even the megalomaniac emperor Nero seriously considered withdrawing his legions from Britain as a result. Rather than face capture, Boadicea eventually took her own life, but her stand against tyranny, oppression and injustice has made her a British heroine without equal. She was revered in Victorian times and a statue of her in her war chariot, with her two daughters, was placed facing the Houses of Parliament, while her status as a folk heroine has only increased with the passing of the years. However, had a lone hare not chosen to run in the way that it did, it is possible that Boadicea might not have embarked on the course of action that made her immortal.
In later times, the hare became connected with the Christian festival of Easter and this gentle creature acquired another affectionate place in British and world folklore when the character of the March Hare appeared in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’, one of the most popular children’s books ever written and one that has been filmed countless times, most recently by Tim Burton.
I would be very interested to see and hear the proponents of blood sports present their case for hare coursing to a jury of schoolchildren, to see if these young people would buy into the conservation/animal welfare claptrap that disguises the squalid desire to see harmless hares pursued and torn apart by dogs for the pleasure of a few human onlookers. It is of course theoretically possible that they’d be persuaded by the feeble arguments, but I think it far more likely that British schoolchildren would be captivated by the story of the warrior queen Boadicea and the hare she released, which prophesied victory over an invading Roman legion.
I suspect that these young jurors would be far more attached to the images of the Mad March Hare presented in Tim Burton’s film than they would be to the grotesque displays of screaming hares being ripped in half at the Waterloo Cup. I also suspect that our young people would be far more interested in learning about the extensive British folkore surrounding hares than in witnessing the hellish spectacle of these gentle creatures being chased and used in a tug of war between two snarling dogs. This minority pastime might be paradise for some, but I’ll leave the final word to Sir Thomas More, a philosopher, statesman, lawyer, humanist and a saint to both Catholics and Anglicans. In his book Utopia, he wrote:
“Thou shouldst rather be moved with pity to see a silly innocent hare murdered of a dog, the weak of the stronger, the fearful of the fierce, the innocent of the cruel and unmerciful. Therefore, all this exercise of hunting is a thing unworthy to be used of free men”.
