Last week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm. Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy side-effect was that the horse floored one of the gang with both hooves. The main body of the antis then caught up with a 30-year-old farmer’s son on a quad bike. They pulled him off it, smashed it up and attacked him with staves, bricks and concrete blocks, breaking his skull in three places. A whipper-in who galloped up to help him was also beaten up, suffering separated ribs and bruised kidneys. They only stopped beating the farmer’s son when someone shouted that the police were coming. To evade the police, the antis ran towards their vehicles, and most of them got away. ‘The police’, at this stage, turned out to be a solitary traffic policeman. One Land-Rover drove straight and fast at him as if to run him over, but he stood his ground to the last moment and then smashed both windscreen and driver’s window with his truncheon, forcing it to stop. Helped by the lady Master, who was on foot, and one foot-follower, the policeman managed to hold the seven antis from the vehicle, handcuffing two of the most aggressive, until reinforcements arrived. Arrests were made and charges have followed. Three things stand out.
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