The Start of the Hunt, ca. 1495–1505
Southern Netherlands
Wool warp; wool, silk, silver, and gilt wefts; 12 ft 1 in. x 14 ft. 4 in. (368 x 315 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1937 (37.80.1)

Hunting with trained dogs in the late Middle Ages provided sport as well as food for the medieval nobility. Among the dogs used in the hunt were the rache or scenting hound, the greyhound, and the mastiff. They pursued bears, wild boars, wolves, and various kinds of deer.

Count Gaston III of Foix, who owned 1,600 hunting dogs, extolled the benefits of the hunt in his Livre de chasse (1387), claiming that a good hunter had no time for vices, did not overeat, and never got sick because he sweated a lot. Ironically, the count died of a stroke in 1391 while returning from a bear hunt.

Very early on the morning of a hunt, huntsmen set out into the forest with scent hounds. When a lymerer (named after the lymer, or scent hound) tracked an animal to its lair, he first marked the place then brought back droppings of the animal to the meadow where a nobleman and his hunting party had gathered for breakfast. Women sometimes joined the men there for wine; they rejoined the hunting party after the slaying of the game.

After meeting with all of the lymerers, the lord (or his deputy, the Master of the Hunt) decided which animal would be hunted. Then relays of kennelmen, each with a pair of leashed hounds, set out to cover the line of retreat that the quarry was thought to take when it broke from cover.

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