198 STAG-HUNTING 



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 where- 

 by 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. 



