Game Preservers and Poachers
Charles Chevenix Trench explains how, from the reign of William the Conqueror until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poacher was restrained by savage penal laws.
Game preservation and poaching, the reverse sides of the same medal, have an ancient history. About 1750 B.C. a village headman in Mesopotamia had to apologize to the Assyrian king for a lioness being killed without authority; she was, he pleaded, an old and mangy beast, who would not have given the King a good hunt. Presumably Hons were scarce near his capital, for His Majesty did not disdain to hunt a bagman: another rural dignitary reported a lion caught in a barn.
“Let my lord then write to me whether this lion should remain in the barn until my lord’s arrival; or else that I am to have it brought to my lord.” The royal instructions were delayed, so “they threw in a dog and a pig for him to eat. Then I was anxious, so I got the Hon into a wooden cage, put it on a river-boat and have sent him to my lord.”
The Greeks and Romans hunted; but they do not seem to have preserved game except, for reUgious purposes, round shrines of Apollo and Artemis. It was the Germanic tribes, infiltrating into and finally shaking loose the structure of the Empire, who introduced into Europe the principles of game preservation as we know it today.
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