THE STAG. 53 



towards offenders when their favourite pastime was 

 endangered. In 1537 the Archbishop Michael of Salz- 

 burg had a peasant, who took possession of a stag which 

 he found dead in his own corn, sewed up in the 

 animal's skin and worried to death by his hounds, he 

 himself looking on the while. In 1562 a poacher was 

 taken in Hesse. The Landgrave, " in his great mercy," 

 remitted the sentence of death; but the man was 

 tortured, his right eye put out, and a stag's antlers 

 branded on his forehead. The usual punishment was 

 the gallows. It is no wonder, therefore, that, when thus 

 protected, the amount of red-deer in the forests of 

 Grermany became immense ; and we may form some 

 estimate of their number when we learn that 7,000 

 head perished of cold in a single very severe winter in 

 Wurtemburg, and in Hesse in 1570-71, 3,000 head 

 were found frozen to death. In the summer of 1558, 

 Landgrave Philip stalked and killed 1 02 good stags, one 

 of which was a stag of twenty, and another one of 

 eighteen. Besides these he killed twenty more in the 

 forest. In that year, 211 stags were delivered at the 

 buttery of the palace at Cassel alone. In 1561 the 

 Landgrave killed between the 1st of June and the 1st 

 of August eighty-one stags, and had taken in hunting 

 ninety-six: besides these he still expected to shoot 

 forty, and to hunt sixty more. Among these was a stag 

 of twenty, two were of eighteen, and three of sixteen. 



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