Hunting for food and for combating predatory wild animals (with the exception of wolves) was mostly a thing of the past by the early modern period [5]; [7]. The forest was increasingly a bone of contention between noble appropriation and peasant use (see below, 2.). In the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the remains of a legitimately peasant hunting tradition clung on almost solely in southern Germany, as in the so-called freie Pürsch (“free stalk”) on the Rottenberg near Tübing…