Different eras have different conceptions of social class. Nowadays it’s mostly about money, although there are some subtle variations based on how you obtained your money, what you spend it on, and whether you hang out with celebrities — and if you do, just what sort of celebrities they are; movie stars, musical performers, business performers, and so on. But in an older, more, um, feathery time, there were social strata related to the kind of birds you kept.
We’re not talking about just any kind of birds; having a pet canary or feeding the pigeons isn’t part of this discussion at all. Nope, we’re focusing on whether you went hunting with falcons, sparrowhawks, kestrels, or goshawks. Part of the distinction might have had to do with how the birds went about their hunting; falcons are said to be much more dramatic, employing a “swooping down from above” approach that’s an attractive in a metaphorical sort of way. Hawks (that is, true hawks, since the lower social classes might flout convention and just call everybody with these birds “hawkers”) are more likely to use the “catch up from behind” process, sort of like a modern car chase.
As you probably sussed out already, having falcons was associated with the very top, socially. You’d be known as a “falconer”. One step down were the folks who kept goshawks. But oddly enough they were never referred to as “goshawkers,” regardless of how obvious that would have been. Nope, as Shakespeare mentioned in Love’s Labor Lost, they were “austringers.”
“Austringer,” which is also spelled “ostringer” and “astringer,” is based on an Old French word for goshawk, which was either hostur, ostour, or autour, depending on where you happen to run across it. Not that you’re really likely to run across any Old French words anywhere at all.
The really low classes of bird-based hunting would use regular hawks or kestrels (which are some sort of hawk, I think), and they were just called “hawkers.”
It was all very complicated, but luckily we know exactly how it was all adjudicated. This is thanks to the Boke of Seynt Albans, a tome printed in 1486 and also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. It was a detailed, illustrated manual addressing everything you’d need to know as a gentleman of England in those days, including all the nuances attached to the sort of birds you ought to use for hunting other birds. Just playing snooker instead was apparently not an option.
It’s not entirely clear, in the “boke,” whether your choice of bird determined the fine details of your social standing, or whether it worked the other way around. But it might not really have mattered; social status is a matter of keeping up appearances, after all, and if you were determined to march around with the kind of birds you thought appropriate for your social altitude, well, there probably wouldn’t be anybody swooping down on you to argue about it.
