Blackbird (Red Herring)

It is wise not to judge the past in the light of these illumined
times. The world at peace in feathered nests, swaddled in nativity,
oh darkness of starry Bethlehem. If the medieval monkish bestiaries
were literature’s first stab at natural history, seeing animals as
allegories, morals for mankind, then the next stage wasn’t much
better for the critters, coming from the goose quills of gentlemen
hunters, anglers, husbandmen; writers like their predecessors intent
on human improvement, although the target market had moved from the
soul to the stomach. Information of habitat, habits, behaviour,
identification, etcetera, compiled to serve entrapment, capture,
cooking. Disinterested observation came with the rational eighteenth
century diarists, chief among them Gilbert White in Hampshire. The
irrational poet Christopher Smart complied lists of creatures to let
rejoice in the madhouse. John Clare was first with the rapture.

Astrologist and herbalist Joseph Blagrave lived at Copt-
Hall on the Seven Bridges in seventeenth century Reading. One of his
four extant books, ‘The Epitome of the Art of Husbandry’, published
in London in 1675, is full of advice and tips, urging and boasting.
It was written by a man who claimed to have exorcised devils from a
girl in Basingstoke, but this book sticks to manuring, marling,
irrigation, how to ride a horse, cabbidges, orchards, sowing and
fishing (‘Brief Experimental Directions for the Right Use of the
Angle’).

Blagrave’s book must have been popular, the copy in the
local studies library at Reading is a third impression with a preface
‘To the Reader’ advertising further additions concerning Singing-
Birds. It sounds attractive, but as you read your sensitive soul will
curl:

“We having spoke before of some varieties for Profit,
and also Pleasure in ordering of several sorts of Fruit-Trees, and
Gardening, and a small touch of Recreation for taking of Fish and
Birds; but now I do intend to enter into a Discourse of Taking,
Preserving, and Keeping all sorts of Birds which sing melodiously
with a ravishing sweet and pleasant Song, wherewith the Master may
have his Recreation and Pleasure, by hearing them sing in his Closes,
Hedges, Parks, or at his Chamber-Window, or otherwise shut up in some
Cages, Rooms, or Aviaries, with Out-Lets for them to take the Air
made for that purpose, to contain the Subject of such pleasure and
delightsome Melody… In the meantime I intend not here to bring in
Fabulous Stories and Histories of their Original Breeding, which
Fantastical poets have vainly imagined and invented…”

Blagrave’s favourite is the Nightingale, but he has a
phansie and appreciation for the lark, linnet, throstle, gold Finch,
robin and jenny wren. You can’t help thinking there were more birds
around then, despite the limed twigs and nets. There’s no sense of
rarity or endangered precariousness; on the contrary every copse
seems stocked with musicians up for grabs. Not that Blagrave
considers himself unkind, for he is full of medicinal concoctions and
dietary concern fro the warbling prisoners, noting the melancholy
that confines their spirit in captivity.

My spirit was relieved on reading his judgment of the
Blackbird:

“I think this may be accounted the worst of those that
are termed singing Birds, and more kept of them than any Birds I
know, the Country-Man and Woman being melancholy without their brave
golden-beaked Black-Bird, for your Country-People value no bird in
comparison of him, and all is for being loud and coarse in his song,
as they are clownish in their Speech and Condition. This Bird is
known to every one, and is better to be eaten than kept, and is much
sweeter to the Palat being dead and well-roasted, than to the Ear
when they are living, for they are delicate Meat if very Fat.”

If anyone ever took his advice, forget the four and
twenty, perhaps Joseph’s Blagrave’s perception of the vulgarity of
the blackbird’s song has allowed us to still hear its persistent
liquid melodies from our television aerials and lampposts.

Peter Hay, 2002