Rule #8: Hunt like a pro

A royal hunt was a public display of power, wealth, expensive purebred animals, ritual, and chivalry. It was also an opportunity for informal diplomacy and private politicking with the monarch away from the prying eyes of court. In addition to expertise in riding and shooting a crossbow, hunting required a deep understanding of animals—both the ones that assisted in the hunt (horses, hounds, hawks) and the ones that were hunted (mostly deer but also rabbits, foxes, game birds, and boars). It was illegal for lower status people to hunt in the forests of wealthy landowners, but poachers risked their lives to put food on the table.

Tame and train your hawks

Falconry, or hawking, is the sport of hunting with a trained bird of prey. Breeding, taming, and caring for hawks required money, skill, time, and space. Because the queen loved hawking and hunting, learning these skills could be a worthwhile investment. Turberville’s encyclopedic work describes the specific characteristics of different kinds of hawks as well as how to coax them into submission based on their gender.

Join the hunt club

Gascoigne’s manual focuses on how to breed, care for, and train hunting dogs and how to track different kinds of animals depending on the month and season. At the end, he includes musical notation for hunting calls.

A hunting horn allowed hunters to communicate with each other over long distances. The rhythm and spacing of the notes refer to different stages of a hunt, such as “When the hounds do hunt a game or chase unknown” or “The death of a Deer with Bow, or Greyhounds.”

Take care of your horses’ hooves

This is the first book in English devoted to all aspects of horsemanship: care, feeding, breeding, and riding. The level of detail Blundeville devotes to his topic rivals any how-to book today. He includes 43 full-page illustrations of bits for a horse’s mouth, and here, he illustrates and explains the “diverse shapes of shoes.”