raditional pomps and usages, with which our Saxon and Norman nobles
hunted him. The hunting passion of the Norman Kings is familiar to us
in our history; how William the Conqueror "loved the tall red deer as
his father," and how he laid waste hamlets and villages in Hampshire,
and the little crops of the toiling villagers, to plant the New Forest
for his pleasure in the deer; and how his son William Rufus met his
death there, while hunting, by an untraced arrow piercing his eye, and
retribution for William's act was made plain to all men. The Saxon
Kings, doubtless, hunted with less pomp, but with an equal passion.
There was a Saxon palace at Porlock, and also at Dulverton, from which
they might hunt on Exmoor, and it may very well be that Alfred the
Great came to Porlock for rest and refreshment among the labours of his
life, his lawgiving and his translating of Latin books into the
Anglo-Saxon tongue for his people's good, and his bitter and incessant
struggle with the Danes.

The laws by which the Kings protected their sport were among the most
cruel and oppressive ever made in England. They were not, so far as I
can find, imposed by the Saxon Kings upon their countrymen, but by the
conquering Norman and Plantagenets. Canute, the Danish King, is said
first to have made death or mutilation the penalties for poaching; but
throughout the Middle Ages the game laws were intricate, rigid, and of
incredible cruelty. To cut off a man's thumbs so that he could not
hold his tools, to lame him, to hang him, for snaring a hare or
shooting a deer in a land abounding with game, while he tilled another
man's ground and went hungry on his salt fish and coarse bread, while
all around him bred and ran the flesh food his stomach craved, and the
King who owned it lived far away, and neither hunted it nor ate it from
spring to winter--this seems one of the stupid and anomalous cruelties
of which the human race is so amazingly capable. It was a concession,
granted by Henry II, for men to be allowed to keep dogs at all, even
for the guarding of their homes and their small flocks; but even so the
animals had to be brought before some magistrate every three years, and
maimed, by cutting off the three claws of the fore-feet, to prevent
them from pursuing or seizing game.

There is a description of stag-hunting in Chaucer's "Book of the
Duchess," which dates somewhere from the end of the fourteenth century,
which is substantially the sa