This egg cup was recovered from a nineteenth-century housing site on Adelaide Street West in downtown Toronto. The cup features an incised narrow blue band below the outer lip, with an embossed leaf motif (an example of ‘rouletting’) and a blue painted band around the stemmed base.
And the animal featured on this next object is not a rabbit, but it’s close enough!
This “hare” hunting button (measuring 14.36 mm) was found on the Watkins-Huffman site – one of three historical sites on a property located just outside Georgetown. The button likely dates to the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
Hare hunting predates fox hunting in England as an aristocratic leisure sport and was considered to be an upper class activity until the late nineteenth century. As game laws in England slowly eroded over the nineteenth century, hare hunting, or coursing, became as much a working class pursuit as a gentrified one.
