History of the french hunting horn

Coursing

Coursing, or big game hunting, has been practised for two thousand years on our land; animals coursed include red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, wild boar, bear and so on. However, hunting in the beginning was a lot different from its modern day practice. Ancient forests were not well laid out; thus they were very hard to access, if not impossible to penetrate. Hunters would cordon off a sector with nets, or by placing guards in key exit points; then they would unleash the hounds to drive prey towards the spots where the hunters were awaiting them. There was almost no limits to the pursuit, and the catch was more often than not abundant.

Whistles and calling horns

In this type of hunting, it was necessary to be able to exchange signals at a distance in order to coordinate the many participants. Up close we were content to shout; at longer ranges, whistles or call horns were used. These rudimentary instruments consisted of a flared, slightly curved tube, about twenty to forty centimeters in length on average. They were made of all kinds of materials: metal, horn, wood, boiled leather, etc. Some were very simple, others richly decorated according to the fortune of their owner. Roland’s mythical olifant, in Charlemagne’s time, was a military parade version, carved from ivory.
Throughout the Middle Ages, we find these instruments under various names: horn, horn, huchet, graile, araine, trunk… But whatever they were, they could only produce one or two sounds. To differentiate the signals, we made short or long series of notes (as with the Morse alphabet used in the past in telegraphy).
For example the “Cornure de Requeste” (requêté) appearing in the Book of the Hunt by Gaston Phoebus, in the 14th century, is described as follows (word = note): “Corner a long word, then four short words followed by another long word, followed by four short words “. Another author of the same period, Henri de Ferrière, writes about the hallali: “All those who have horns must corner together, and it is beautiful melody”. No doubt our ears would not hear it that way today, but we see that the huntsmen were not insensitive to the musical aspect of these primitive “horns” which foreshadow the trumpet fanfares.