Philobiblon

Erasmus in Moriae Encomium of 1509 mocked the English hunting tradition. This a translation by Sir Thomas Chaloner from 1549:

For as touchyng the death of a deare, or other wilde deast, ye know your selves, what ceremonies they use about the same. Every poore man maie cutte out an oxe, or a shepe, whereas suche venaison maie not be dismembered but of a gentilman; who beareheadded, and set on knees, with a knife prepared proprely to that use … also with certainte jestures, cuttes a sunder certaine partes of the wildbeast, in certaine order verie circumstantly. Which durying, the standers by, not speakyng a worde, behold it solemnly, as if it were some holy Misterie, havyng seen the like yet more than a hundred tymes before.

This strikes me as an oddly pagan ceremony; but would this be something that survived through the Middle Ages, in a continuous tradition back to Saxons, or even earlier, or something revived through exposure to classical texts?

(Quoted in Wilson, E. “The Testament of the Buck and the Sociology of the Text,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol XLV, 1994, pp. 176) I’ve changed “u”s to “v”s and “i”s to “j”s for readability.