Times Book Review: Blood Sport by Ema Griffin

This looks like an interesting book. It's history of blood sports (fox hunting etc) in Britain.

Emma Griffin’s social history of hunting dates the onset of sport as a divisive force to 1066. While the chase has a much older pedigree, it was the Normans who made it explicitly the privilege of the rulers to kill deer and boar for their pleasure, and created an elaborate code of conduct that was refined through succeeding centuries. Ever since, sport has mostly been about class. “The par force hunt was an ostentatious demonstration of wealth, power and prestige,” writes Griffin, a lecturer in history at East Anglia University, “not a utilitarian search for food .. . [Hunting in Britain] is not a timeless, peasant tradition, but an endless, and often artificial, attempt to protect huntable ‘wild’ animals in an ever more cultivated land.”