CHAPTER I IN DAYS OF YORE THE chase of the wild red deer, as practised in Devon and Somerset, is the only survival in England of a sport which was followed in earlier days in most countries in Europe, and which still has many devotees on the Continent. Books have been written on the subject from 1275 to this present time, and it is possible from them and from contemporary pictures to trace its development on both sides of the Channel for more than six hundred years. Originally no doubt deer were hunted for food as much as for the pleasure of chasing them, so we find that for a considerable period nets and bows and arrows played as prominent a part in the chase as hounds. But these methods led to indiscriminate slaughter, and breeding hinds with young deer of both sexes were of necessity the most frequent victims of such attacks; the superior cunning of the old stags and hinds-the very animals whose death was most desired-enabling them to escape. So in the fourteenth century at any rate, if not before, men began to recognise that if they would hunt or capture the best stag, rather than the first who should present himself, it was indispensable that he should be 'harboured,' i.e. that his whereabouts should be ascertained beforehand, and this so exactly that he should be roused with certainty and without loss of time. Of the arts and mysteries of woodcraft whereby this should be accomplished, and the stag subsequently hunted secundum artem, the fullest and most complete description is found in the writings of Gaston, third Count de Foix, who died in 1394 with eight hundred couple of hounds in his kennels. He was a mighty hunter, and his book seems for centuries to have been the standard work on sport. Though rare now and almost forgotten, it was the basis of the earliest practical treatise on hunting in our language, the Mayster of the Game,' published at the end of the fourteenth century, and is quoted wholesale by Jacques du Fouilloux, a French author who wrote in 1561: whose book in its turn achieved such celebrity that it was translated into English, German, and Italian, and became the real, though unacknowledged, parent of nearly every other volume that has been written on the subject since. |