18 
FOREST AND STREAM 
JANUARY, 1918 
YOUR HUNTING TROPHY—WHAT ABOUT IT? 
AN OBJECT OF HISTORIC, ROMANTIC AND PSYCHOLOGICAL INTEREST, THE HEAD OF 
STAG OR ELK HAS SOMETHING PRINCELY ABOUT IT THAT VISUALIZES SPORT ROYAL 
By HENRY RICHMOND COYLE 
lish house of Plantagenet, who had large 
possessions in France and Spain. A man 
of singularly engaging personality he was. 
this old author, by name Gaston de Fois. 
He was a comely young man of fine pres¬ 
ence and of much golden hair, so that usu¬ 
ally he was known as Gaston Phoebus, 
because of his great manly beauty. Such 
was the charm and vigor of his nature that 
even today his book is sometimes known as 
“Gaston Phoebus,” and not as “The Master 
of Game.” 
Now Gaston, while yet young, and soon 
after he had finished his one and only book 
—that one which we may call as important, 
perhaps more important, than any in the 
literature of sport—was killed by a wild 
boar in the year 1392, or just about an hun¬ 
dred years before Columbus discovered 
New York. His book sometimes was known 
as “Le Chasse.” In the mutations of time, 
both name and authorship have been altered. 
Today you perhaps will find your copy of 
“The Master of Game” carrying the name 
as author of Edward, Second Duke of York. 
As a matter of fact, that gentleman trans¬ 
lated from old French into old English, 
somewhere between 1406 and 1413, these 
priceless old pages, thereby winning for his 
own the glory that belonged to another—a 
not uncommon occurrence in translations. 
E DWARD had plenty of time to do his 
work—in fact he had more time than 
anything else, for he was in jail. They 
put him there because he had been accused 
of the mere trifle of conspiring with his sis¬ 
ters to assassinate the king and carry off 
certain of the king's family relations. Ed¬ 
ward is said to have been something of a 
bird himself. He was the grandson of King 
Edward the Third, and was born under a 
turbulent star. At one time he was ob¬ 
served toting around on a pole the head of 
his unde, the well-known Duke of Glouces¬ 
ter. But in or out of jail, Edward has 
squared himself with us by handing 
us down this English translation of 
the old book of Gaston Phoebus— 
who, by the way, must have been a 
personal acquaintance and friend of 
his. Moreover, whatever may have 
been his personal life, or his fondness 
for manslaughter among his relatives, 
he squared it all when he died like a 
gentleman and a scholar on the his¬ 
toric field of Agincourt in France. 
Both Edward, Duke of York, and 
Gaston Phoebus, Prince of France 
and Spain, were bold and able men. 
They were patrons of art and let¬ 
ters, and were men well-educated as 
such matters went in their day. “For 
each of them the chase stood as a 
hearty and vigorous pastime of the 
kind that makes a people great.” Each 
was a mighty lord and a mighty 
hunter. Each was a statesman and 
a warrior. Between them they have 
given us a book of imperishable in¬ 
terest for any sportsman or any man 
who knows of sport. 
The old book tells much the same 
story for France and England, for at 
that time, about three and one-half 
centuries after the conquest of Eng¬ 
land by the Norman French, the chase 
was pursued on both sides of the 
English Channel in much the same’ 
way. We may read, therefore of the 
pursuit of the hart, the boar, the roe¬ 
buck, the wolf, the fox, the wildcat; 
the badger, etc. But most of all is 
attention given to the royal annual 
then called the hart—the “stag” of 
Europe as we understand it today. 
At the time Gaston Phoebus wrote the 
bison was not extinct in Europe, nor was 
it for two or three hundred years later*. 
Perhaps the last aurochs had been killed 
before his time. The great red deer still 
lived in Europe in considerable numbers, 
and the wild boar, the bear, the wolf were 
then creatures of dread and terror, to be 
pursued only by men of skill and hardihood. 
It is to be remembered that gunpowder was 
not then in use. The chase had its dangers, 
for it ended only in the close encounter of 
man and animal, and the only weapon man 
might have was the bow or the spear or the 
sword. A sportsman then must possess 
even more than in these days the qualifica¬ 
tions of strength of arm, courage of heart, 
and calmness in meeting emergency. 
A S to the elk head, the deer head, the 
moose or caribou head, on your wall, 
what do you really know about it ? 
Perhaps offhand you say that you got it at 
such and such a place, so many years ago. 
Very likely your guest or friend, if he be 
himself a hunter, will listen politely to you. 
Very likely also you will not tell just what 
share your guide had in the accumulation 
of the trophy. So perhaps you will ignore 
the trophy eventually. You ought not to do 
so. It is really an object of historic, ro¬ 
mantic, and even psychological interest, 
leaving entirely to one side the sentimental 
interest it may have for you as its 
owner by right of conquest. 
There is something princely, some¬ 
thing royal, in the head of the stag, 
or of the elk, and it was entirely 
proper that the hunting of the stag, 
the hart, the buck, was always held a 
royal sport, not open to all the world. 
Only in this bountiful country of 
America have these royal privileges, 
at any time these many centuries, 
been open to all the people. 
There are many traditions which 
cluster around the possibly forgotten 
trophy which hangs in your hall— 
to get at the earliest ones we would 
need to go back to a time long before 
there w r as so much democracy in the 
world. No matter how far back we 
should go, we would find that many 
customs of the chase have been per¬ 
petuated with singularly little change 
through all these years. Your stag 
head, your elk head, your great moose 
head, would have been beyond a 
dream perhaps of any monarch of 
the old world five hundred years ago; 
yet his trophies were hunted in much 
the same manner as were yours. 
In all likelihood when you killed 
your first deer you felt an impulsive 
desire to write the story about it, and 
to see it in print. Very possibly the 
first sporting writings of the world 
began in some such impulse. 
T HE first book written on hunting 
dates back to the Middle Ages 
—to 1387, to be precise—and in 
its original text would be difficult to 
read today, for it was done in the old 
French, handpainted and beautifully illum¬ 
ined. There are nineteen manuscript copies 
of this book in existence—but you would 
have to go to the British Museum to see it 
at its best. Reading it, you would get not 
only some idea of sport in the olden times, 
but of language in those same times—the 
language of Chaucer being that employed in 
the translation of the original book. 
This, the oldest and most valuable of all 
the books of sport, is now obtainable in 
book form for the first time. It is called 
"The Master of Game,” and is an odd repos¬ 
itory of valuable information regarding wild 
game animals, dogs, methods of huntin'g, 
etc. The work was begun in 1387 by a 
French nobleman, of kinship with the Eng¬ 
