Learning to Handle Hounds in the Field

Frank Freeman: 21 years as huntsman to the Pytchley  /   Painting by George Wright (British)

What follows is an excerpt from The History of Foxhunting by Patrick Chalmers. Therein, the following text is quoted from Lord Chaplin’s introduction to Lord Henry Bentinck’s Foxhounds and Their Handling in the Field.

I was rather late one morning in arriving at a gorse covert in the Belvoir Country...into which the hounds had just been put to draw. I...saw at once it wasn’t the huntsman who was in the covert with the hounds, and I was told it was the first whip, Freeman, who had never hunted them before, the huntsman being disabled by a fall the previous day. So I went into the covert to see if I could help him.