Huntmaster Roger Hawtrey

Three seasons in Wychwood made Saint Hester's Hounds famous and turned their field reputation into charter and privilege. The wood remembers the man who led them less for the killing than for paying the beaters.

Saint Hester's Hounds were a licensed monster company of the Oxford road before they were anything more, named for Saint Hester of the Bridges by founders who had worked the London crossings. Roger Hawtrey took the company over in its lean years and kept it alive on drover escorts and carcass work. Then, in 4417, something began taking people in Wychwood.

What it was the Hounds and the woodmote describe differently, and the Hounds' own book calls it only the man-eater. It took three seasons. Hawtrey's method was patient and expensive: he would not drive the rides with men who had not been paid in advance, he lodged a widow's claim with the verderers for every tenant who lost beasts to the beaters, and he signed the wood's regard, which is to say he put the company on the wood's record, before he cut a single ride. When the thing was dead in 4419 the woodmote owed him nothing and said so in writing, which in Wychwood is a compliment.

The charter followed, and with it the privileges that made the Hounds a name. Book I's lesson of the hunts is that a celebrated hunter may strike the last blow while the lasting memory is of who closed the road and who fed the beaters; the Hounds tell it the other way round, and are proud that in Wychwood both are Hawtrey.

In person

About forty at the hunts, square and weather-browned, with a short dark beard, a broken nose and a scar through one eyebrow. A buff leather coat to the knee with a green baldric and a brass hunting horn, a broad felt hat with a hound's-head badge, long boots, a boar spear in his hand; he stands in a ride of old oak with hounds held on couples behind him.