There can be no hunt worthy of the name without law and custom; it is a fact apprehended as much by practical consideration as by the imagination. And there was a history to practice and imagination.

In the heroic fantasy of a world opened to the vistas of wayfaring and exploit, the warrior's prowess directed its energy upon the kill, the physical and symbolic conquest of aurochs, boar, and hart. The ideal of an egalitarian warriordom scorned any man's claim to the pre-possession of game by right of privilege. The free-capture hunt presented both law and ideology in support of the heroic ideal, no matter how nostalgic.

Yet the slow but inexorable centralization of power, together with the priorities it set on land tenure, established hierarchies on the hunting field that disprivileged men of the free-capture folkrights of old. The hunt became so symbolically valuable that it was regarded a resource to be restricted, even monopolized. The royal forests and their “bastard slips,” hunting reserves and game laws, thus firmly related hunting to territory that bore a kind of personalized imprint. The king's hunt figured as a translation of Carolingian imperium to England; the royal forests were stocked with fallow deer brought from the Mediterranean.

Fostered by the royal court, the legally underwritten value of the hunt spurred the elaboration of hunting arts, which flourished in conjunction with the rise of chivalry and its spectacles. It was Tristan, the iconic hunter of legend, who underscored the need for chivalric differentiation in the hunt when he was imagined in romance to reject heroic-age butchery in favor of a courtly protocol that focused attention upon how to handle the body of fallen game. The knightly hunter's skill in using jargon and dismembering the carcass was held to exhibit nobility in knowledge, grace, and discipline; that is, it revealed keys to social identity.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, textual renditions of the craft, both technical and poetic, came to be factored into efforts to differentiate and define identities marked by national character and literacy as English writers asserted a vigorous independence from their French chivalric foundations. The parforce hunt on deer and hare, as later on the fox, became so thoroughly tied to English identity as to provoke comment by foreign observers for centuries to come.