xxii FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION 



where for more than three centuries it held its 

 own in the gloomy morasses of the plain 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 plenti- 

 ful, 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 favourite pastime. 



Eager though the early Norman and Planta- 

 genet 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 



