The Master of Game: The Oldest English Book on Hunting

Edward of Norwich wrote this book in a prison cell, detained for treason against his cousin Henry IV. Rather than rot in idle bitterness, he composed the oldest English treatise on hunting, translating and expanding Count Gaston de Foix's French masterwork while adding five original chapters of his own. The result is a window into a vanished world: medieval hunting as ritual grammar, where understanding the hare's cunning or the stag's changing antlers mattered as much as any lance or hound. Here are the breeds of dog and how to train them, the horn calls that coordinated a hunt across miles of forest, the rules for distributing meat among beaters and lords alike. Roosevelt's foreword to this edition rhapsodizes that the book possesses "all Chaucer's freshness, love of the open sky and fragrant woodland." That isn't hyperbole. This is living medieval English prose, dense with hard-won practical knowledge and a worldview where the chase shaped body and character alike. For naturalists, historians, and anyone curious about what the English once knew and have since forgotten.