The Anatomy of Melancholy

Others, I say, are ruined by those mad sports of hawking and hunting: honourable recreations, suitable for some great men, but not for every person of low or inferior rank. While they insist on keeping their falconers, dogs and hunting horses, their wealth, says Salmuth, runs away with the hounds, and their fortunes fly away with the hawks. They pursue beasts so long that at last they themselves degenerate into beasts, as Agrippa reproaches them: like Actaeon. For as he was eaten to death by his own dogs, so they devour themselves and their inherited estates in such idle and unnecessary sports, meanwhile neglecting their more necessary business and the duties of their callings.

Our great men, too, are sometimes excessively mad in their delight and obsession with it: when they drive poor farmers from their fields, as John of Salisbury objects in Policraticus, book 1, chapter 4; pull down country farms and whole towns to make parks and forests; starve people to feed beasts; and meanwhile punish anyone who interferes with their game more severely than a common cut-throat or notorious thief. But great men can be excused in some respects; people of lower rank have no defence against being counted mad.

Poggio the Florentine tells an amusing story to this effect, condemning the folly and pointless occupation of such people. A physician in Milan, he says, who treated madmen, had a pit of water in his house. He kept his patients in it, some up to their knees, some to their waists, some to their chins, “according to the degree of madness,” as they were more or less affected. One who had recovered well happened to stand in the doorway. Seeing a gentleman ride past on a fine horse, with a hawk on his fist and his spaniels following, he insisted on knowing what all this equipment was for.

The gentleman answered that it was to kill certain birds. The patient then asked what the birds he killed in a year might be worth. He replied, five or ten crowns. Pressed further about what his dogs, horse and hawk cost him, he said four hundred crowns. At that, the patient told him to be gone, as he valued his life and well-being: “If our master comes and finds you here, he will put you in the pit among the madmen, up to your chin.” The story rebukes the madness and folly of such vain men, who exhaust their means on idle sports while neglecting their business and necessary affairs.

Leo the Tenth, that hunting pope, is severely censured by Giovio in his Life for his excessive passion for hawking and hunting, so much so that, Giovio says, he would sometimes stay near Ostia for weeks and months at a time, leaving petitioners unattended and bulls and pardons unsigned, to his own detriment and the loss of many private individuals.