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 same, I suppose, as a modern hunt on Exmoor; a few of the terms are different. The stag is "embossed," meaning "hidden in a thicket," and Chaucer says he is "rechased" when he means he is headed back, while the note which the huntsman sounds to recall the hounds when the stag is lost is a "forloyn." But stag-hunting elsewhere than on Exmoor is virtually an archaic imitation of a sport. The beast is carted to the meet, loosed, chased, and when brought to bay is recaptured and carted back to captivity. Here it is a natural affair, and rendered necessary by the depredations which the deer commit on the farmers' crops; it also contains an element of danger to the hunters, and calls for coolness, decision, and endurance: for the pace is killing, the going rough, the hills tremendously steep, there are rocky combes down which the rider has to plunge, streams to ford, bogs which make the going unsafe, if not actually dangerous--and a rider, unfamiliar with Exmoor, who finds himself caught in an October mist had better jog quietly home before worse befall him--and, at the last, the chance of losing the stag, or having him, as happens occasionally, plunge desperately off the rocks into the sea.