For most, Boxing Day is a time for leftovers and lounging, but in the New Forest of England during the late 1800s and early 1900s it signified something more primal. On the 26th of December each year, the winter-stilled woods echoed with the sounds of a cruel and peculiar tradition known as ‘squoyling,’ in which local men and boys hunted red squirrels with sticks and stones. Janet Case, a published diarist and scholar, learnt of this ‘game’ in 1928, at which point it was apparently still an annual event.
The Diary Entry
New Forest, 26 December
A hateful thing is done here, done every Boxing Day, but I never happened to hear of it until this year. On Boxing Day the boys of the village go out in company to the woods to hunt the squirrel. Their game is to stone them to death. Squirrels are wary and shy and the hunters none too skilful, but they do take toll of them. I do not know the origin of this ugly sport. A forester who has known of it the last five-and-twenty years knew of a tradition that the squirrels eat the tops of the yews, and that this practice is a yearly punitive expedition, but I expect it has a more primitive source than that. Is there not some tradition that connects the red squirrel with Judas Iscariot? – something older still. The primitive ‘hunting of the wren’, which Frazier includes among primitive agricultural or even pre-agricultural rites, used also to be practised here, but happily now has been discontinued. It was not confined in this place to any one day in the year. When will the squirrel hunt die out? While deer and fox and hare are hunted the village boys may say with reason ‘Why not the squirrel too?’
Further Reading
Janet Case’s diary entries originally appeared in the pages of the Guardian under the name J. E. Case. In 1939 a selection were published by River Press in the book, Country Diaries.
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