On 7 June 1642, John Symons, a servant of Sir Peter Temple, uttered this challenge, attempted to seize the deer, and received a painful blow to the head from John Rands, a servant of Peter Dayrell, his master's enemy. This violent wrangling over a dead animal in an obscure corner of northwestern Buckinghamshire may seem like a dubious place to begin a discussion of the common notions of order and hierarchy expressed in hunting. Most forms of violence, personal and collective, are taken as expressions of disorder, as evils usually banished from prescriptive notions of a rightly ordered world. John Symons himself held this view of the matter. According to Symons, the trespass on Sir Peter Temple's “ground” in Stowe, a disorderly and perhaps criminal action, caused the violent affray that culminated in the assault on his person. But even discounting Symons's obvious interest in redress for a sore head, violence is seldom construed as a part of the way order is made.