x THE MASTER OF GAME

and in one Lithuanian preserve of the Czar—and the aurochs, the huge wild ox—the Urus
of Cesar—which has now vanished from the world. In the Nibelungen Lied, when
Siegfried’s feats of hunting are described, it is specified that he slew both the bear and the
elk, the bison and the aurochs. One of the early Burgundian kings was killed while
hunting the bison ; and Charlemagne was not only passionately devoted to the chase of
these huge wild cattle, but it is said prized the prowess shown therein by one of his
stalwart daughters.

By the fourteenth century, when the Count of Foix wrote, the aurochs was practically or
entirely extinct, and the bison had retreated eastwards, where for more than three centuries
it held its own in the gloomy morasses of the plains south-east of the Baltic. In western
Europe the game was then the same in kind that it is now, although all the larger species
were very much more plentiful, the roebuck being perhaps the only one of the wild
animals that has since increased in numbers. With a few exceptions, such as the Emperor
Maximilian, the kings and great lords of the Middle Ages were not particularly fond of
chamois and ibex hunting ; it was reserved for Victor Emmanuel to be the first sovereign
with whom shooting the now almost vanished ibex was a tavourite pastime.

Eager though the early Norman and Plantagenet kings and nobles of England were in
the chase, especially of the red deer, in France and Germany the passion for the sport was
still greater. In the end, on the continent the chase became for the upper classes less a
pleasure than an obsession, and it was carried to a fantastic degree. Many of them
followed it with brutal indifference to the rights of the peasantry and to the utter neglect
of all the serious affairs of life. During the disastrous period of the Thirty Years War,
the Elector of Saxony spent most of his time in slaughtering unheard-of numbers of red
deer ; if he had devoted his days and his treasure to the urgent contemporary problems of
statecraft and warcraft he would have ranked more nearly with Gustavus Adolphus and
Wallenstein, and would have stood better at the bar of history. Louis XVI. was also
devoted to the chase in its tamer forms, and was shooting at driven game when the Paris
mob swarmed out to take possession of his person. The great lords, with whom love of
hunting had become a disease, not merely made of game-preserving a grievous burden for
the people, but also followed the chase in ways which made scant demands upon the
hardier qualities either of mind or of body. Such debased sport was contemptible then ;
and it is contemptible now. Luxurious and effeminate artificiality, and the absence of all
demand for the hardy virtues, rob any pastime of all title to regard. Shooting at driven
game on occasions when the day’s sport includes elaborate feasts in tents on a store of good
things brought in waggons or on the backs of sumpter mules, while the sport itself makes no
demand upon the prowess of the so-called sportsman, is but a dismal parody upon the stern
hunting life in which the man trusts to his own keen eye, stout thews, and heart of steel for
success and safety in the wild warfare waged against wild nature.

Neither of the two authors now under consideration comes in this undesirable class.
Both were mighty men with their hands, terrible in battle, of imposing presence and
turbulent spirit. Both were the patrons of art and letters, and both were cultivated in the
learning of the day. For each of them the chase stood as a hardy and vigorous pastime
of the kind which makes a people great. The one was Count Gaston de Foix, author of
the most famous of medieval hunting-books, a mighty lord and mighty hunter, as well as
statesman and warrior. The other was Edward, second Duke of York, who at Agincourt
« died victorious.” He translated into English a large portion of Gaston de Foix’s “ La
Chasse,” adding to it five original chapters. He called his book “* The Master of Game.”

FOREWORD x1

Gaston’s book is better known as «Gaston Phebus,” the nickname of the author
which Froissart has handed down. He treats not only of the animals of France, but
of the ibex, the chamois, and the reindeer, which he hunted in foreign lands. ““ Dhe
Master of Game” is the oldest book on hunting in the English language. The
interesting because of the light they throw upon
English hunting customs in the time of the Plantagenets. The book has never hitherto
been published. Nineteen ancient manuscript copies are known; of the three best
extant two are on the shelves of the Bloomsbury treasure house, the other in the Bodleian
Library. Like others of the famous old authors on venery, both the Count of Foix and the
Duke of York show an astonishing familiarity with the habits, nature, and chase of their
quarry. Both men, like others of their kind among their contemporaries, made of the chase
not only an absorbing sport but almost the sole occupation of their leisure hours. They
passed their days in the forest and were masters of woodcraft. Game abounded, and not only
the chase but the killing of the quarry was a matter of intense excitement and an exacting
test of personal prowess, for the boar, or the bear, or hart at bay was slain at close quarters
with the spear or long knife.

“The Master of Game” is not only of interest to the sportsman, but also to the
naturalist, because of its quaint accounts of the “ nature » of the various animals; to the
philologist because of the old English hunting terms and the excellent translations of the
chapters taken from the French ; and to the lover of art because of the beautiful illustra-
tions, with all their detail of costume, of hunting accoutrements, and of ceremonies of “la

original chapters are particularly

grande venerie”—which are here reproduced in facsimile from one of the best extant French
manuscripts of the early fifteenth century. The translator has left out the chapters on
trapping and snaring of wild beasts which were contained in the original, the hunting with
running hounds being the typical and most esteemed form of the sport. Gaston Phoebus’s
“La Chasse” was written just over a century before the discovery of America; ‘“ The
Master of Game” some fifteen or twenty years later. The former has been reprinted many
times. Mr. Baillie-Grohman in reproducing the latter in such beautiful form has rendered
a real service to all lovers of sport, of nature, and of books—and no one can get the highest

enjoyment out of sport unless he can live over again in the library the keen pleasure he
experienced in the wilderness.

; In modern life big-game hunting has assumed many widely varied forms. There are
still remote regions of the earth in which the traveller must depend upon his prowess as a
hunter for his subsistence, and here and there the foremost settlers of new country still war
against the game as it has been warred against by their like since time primeval. But over
most of the earth such conditions have passed away for ever. Even in Ages game pre-
ee on a gigantic scale has begun. Such game preserving may be of two kinds. In
: ce et ae ora Bnoup of such individuals, erect and maintain
Ra Aone es : ee eing their property just as much as domestic animals,
of public spirit and due re nes 5 eS tcc. a aa
cae and feelings of others, may do much good
i eee ae eel But wherever the population is sufficiently er,
[on see ie preferable and more democratic way of preserving

public preserves, of protected nurseries and breeding-grounds,

hil Be
while the laws define the conditions under which all alike may shoot the game, and th
; e

See 3 ;
rictions under which all alike must enjoy the privilege. It is in this way that the wild