But for the fact that lists were not generally kept in these early days, there is every reason to think that present hound pedigrees could be traced from the hounds of 1730 or 1740, but the registration departments of many of the great kennels could not have been very perfect as although Brocklesby can boast of records to 1713, there must have been some breaks up to 1745, when Mr. Pelham—afterwards the first Lord Yarborough—saw the necessity of keeping such accounts of breeding clearly and regularly, and so kept his stud books in his own handwriting. Whether this practice lapsed or not is not recorded, but when Mr. Tongue (Cecil) formulated his stud book, he could not go much further back than 1787; or at least that was the last date he gave to a hound called Dover, by Lord Monson’s Driver out of Whimsey. Cecil was a most industrious investigator, and he would have gone back to the Ark with sufficient evidence for the undertaking. As a matter of fact, my old friend, who gave me most of his hound lists, pulled up at something like the years referred to, his very latest date being 1779, when mentioning a bitch called Rosamond, by Mr. Meynell’s Roister out of Lord Ludlow’s Tasty. Of course, in making such researches, the difficulties to overcome are that many packs have been dispersed, and so records have ended. That really happened to Mr. Meynell’s, Lord Ludlow’s, Mr. John Muster’s, and Lord Monson’s, to the detriment of perhaps the hereditary packs that had been indebted to them for blood.
Considering that several changes have taken place in its history during the past hundred and fifty years, it is remarkable that so much hereditary material is forthcoming from Lord Middleton’s pack, but this is partially due to the fact that one man and his son after him were the huntsmen to it for nearly eighty years. These were William Carter and Tom Carter, the former being in office when Sir Tatton Sykes took on the country (with his brother, Sir Mark Masterman Sykes), that is now occupied by Lord Middleton. That was in 1804, but William Carter, who must have been an intelligent fellow, and particularly fond of dates and pedigrees, knew all the hounds from 1764. The book he compiled—and which is at the present time in the possession of Lord Middleton—was really perfectly kept, and through its pages some of the entries can be most certainly traced up to Cecil’s Stud Book, published in 1864, and so on to occupants of the kennel benches to-day.