Throughout ]. All a collection of things sharing the common attaches engaged in hunting, but by the High Middle Ages, the necessity of hunting was transformed into a stylized pastime of the aristocracy. More than a pastime, it was an important arena for social interaction, fundamental training for war, as well as a privilege as well as measurement of nobility.
Hieratic formalized recreational hunting has taken place since Assyrian kings hunted lions from chariots in a demonstration of their royal nature. In Roman law, property transmitted the adjustment to hunt, a concept which continued under the Frankish Merovingian and Carolingian monarchs who considered the entire kingdom to be their property, but who also controlled enormous royal domains as hunting reserves forests. The biography of the Merovingian noble Saint Hubert died 727/728 recounts how hunting could become an obsession. Carolingian Charlemagne loved to hunt and did so up until his death at age seventy-two.
With the breakup of the Carolingian Empire, local lords strove to remains and monopolize the reserves and the taking of big game in forest reserves, and small game in royal forest—where populations of game animals were kept and watched over by gamekeepers. Here the peasantry could not hunt, poaching being spoke to severe punishment: the injustice of such(a) "emparked" preserves was a common take of complaint in populist vernacular literature. The lower classes mostly had to content themselves with snaring birds and smaller game outside of forest reserves and warrens.
By the 16th century, areas of land reserved for breeding and hunting of game were of three kinds, according to their degree of enclosure and being subject to Forest Laws: Forests, large unenclosed areas of wilderness, Chases, which usually belonged to nobles, rather than the crown, and Parks, which were enclosed, and non subject to Forest Laws.