The hunting ceremony of the king's court, which the Rockingham poachers mocked so as to curse the “father of the deer,” extended to the hunting of magnates and those who had benefit of laws of forest, chase, and free warren. These nobles held a monopoly on the hunting in those spaces and invested imagination and treasure in the social differentiation that such a monopoly brought them in their locale. The ancient common chase, like other durable traditions continuing since pre-Norman days, still opened the less-than-prime hunting grounds of the realm to any who had the will to make use of them, hunting chiefly hare, fallow and roedeer, fox and other fur-bearers, more seldomly (if at all) the red deer, as good as never the boar. Questions will remain about the relevance of ceremony to poaching or hunting in the common chase, but it is fair to assume that observances of some kind had attended common hunting since time out of mind, for hunting was too atavistic and psychically charged a venture not to be regarded with a measure of respect as was felt due the quarry and the bloodsport itself. But the legal segregation of the reserve, which forbade the hunt on certain animals except by the holder of its charter, conduced to a focus dramatic in nature upon those privileged with the liberty to ride and kill, and be seen riding and killing. With legal privilege the hunt became a complex event, for not only did privilege require conspicuous exhibition in order to sustain its charter; privilege had an audience of the commons and nobility alike that expected a superiority of action and comportment that manifested itself not by a humane ethos, but by heightened formalism. It was not by chance that English treatises on hunting gave note to laws and customs of forests, chases, and parks as their authors spelled out the formalities apposite to such privilege.

Chapter 1 of this study considered symbolism of authority derived from hunting cultures of the Germanic north, focusing on the symbolic power of the Hart to embody an ethos of benevolent dynastic rule, albeit a rule subject to challenge on the fiction of that benevolence. Chapter 2 identified two dominant tropes arising from the controversy surrounding the royal forestae.