All Up

For five days in the third week of July, six rowing skiffs work their way up the Thames from Sunbury to Abingdon, about seventy-nine miles, and the men in them are counting swans.

They wear scarlet if they belong to the Crown, white if they belong to the Vintners’ Company and navy blue if they belong to the Dyers’. The King’s Swan Marker sits in a longer skiff called a randan, in red, wearing a hat with a white swan’s feather in it.

When a family of birds is spotted, somebody shouts All up!, and the boats close round them.

Why the Crown owns swans

Because they were food. A swan was a luxury dish for a medieval feast, and from the twelfth century the Crown claimed ownership of every mute swan in the country in order to control who got to eat one.

Ownership could be granted away, and in the fifteenth century Edward IV granted rights to two of the City of London livery companies, the Vintners and the Dyers. Those grants have never been rescinded, which is why the swans on this stretch of river still belong to three parties.

They were marked to prove it. Nicks were cut into the beak — two for the Vintners, one for the Dyers, none at all for the Crown, whose birds were identified by having no mark. The registers of who owned which pattern were kept on vellum, in documents called swan rolls.

The beak-cutting stopped. The birds are now ringed on the leg, and the rings are logged with the British Trust for Ornithology.

What it actually is now

A wildlife survey with a flotilla.

Nobody eats swans. Nobody needs to establish ownership. What the uppers do for five days is catch every bird they can, weigh the cygnets, measure them, check the adults, and treat injuries — overwhelmingly from fishing hooks and discarded line, which is the main thing killing swans on the Thames.

They also produce the only long-run population figure for that stretch of river. Recent years have been bad: avian influenza took out a lot of breeding pairs, and flooding has washed nests away.

The timing is not ceremonial either. The third week of July is when the adults are moulting and cannot fly and the cygnets are not yet flying, which is the only window in the year when you can catch them.

The Vintners’ uppers are all Thames Watermen, and every one of them has won Doggett’s Coat and Badge — a sculling race first run in 1715 and the oldest continuously contested sporting event in the world.