Twiti, William, -1328

William Twiti was huntsman for King Edward II (1284-1327). Twiti's L'Art de vénerie (or the The art of hunting), originally composed in Anglo-Norman French, is considered the first work on hunting to be written in England and an important source for later writers on hunting (parts of it appear in The boke of St. Albans of 1486). Like Henri de Ferrières's Le livre du Roy Modus et de la Royne Racio, Twiti's treatise takes the form of a dialogue in which the huntsman answers questions put to him by his apprentice. The short work includes sections on the qualities of commonly hunted beasts (such as the hare, hart, boar, and fox), the classification of such animals, the horn calls and cries used in different hunts, the rewarding of hunting hounds, and the flaying of the catch.

The craft of venery is a mid-15th century reworking, considerably amplified and reordered, of Twiti's L'Art de vénerie. David Scott-Macnab argues that the textual variation of The craft of venery is great enough that it should be treated as an independent work (the most important and most accurate analysis of the present manuscript is found in Scott-Macnab's The Middle English text of The art of hunting (Heidelberg, 2009). Much of the description in this record is based on Scott-Macnab's work). The craft of venery survives in two manuscripts, including the present manuscript and British Library MS Lansdowne 285, the latter being a direct (and inferior) copy of the YCBA manuscript.

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