We have here an allusion to the ancient method of “breaking up” a deer.[18] “The fellow of this walk” is the forester, to whom it was customary on such occasions to present a shoulder. Dame Juliana Berners, in her “Boke of St. Albans,” 1496, says,—
“And the right shoulder, wheresoever he be,
Bere it to the foster, for that is fee.”
And in Turbervile’s “Book of Hunting,” 1575, the distribution of the various parts of a deer is minutely described.
The touching description of a wounded stag, in As You Like It, can scarcely escape notice. Alluding to “the melancholy Jaques,” one of the lords says,—
“To-day my lord of Amiens and myself
Did steal behind him, as he lay along
Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;
To the which place a poor sequestred stag,