On 7 June 1642, John Symons, a servant of Sir Peter Temple, challenged these words, attempted to seize the deer, and received a blow to the head from John Rands, a servant of Peter Dayrell, his mastera's enemy. Perhaps an argument over a dead animal in a corner of northwestern Buckinghamshire seems a dubious point of departure for a discussion of order and hierarchy in early modern England. Most forms of violence, personal and collective, are usually understood as expressions of disorder, as evils excluded from prescriptive notions of a rightly ordered world. According to this view, the trespass on Sir Peter Temple's land in Stowe, a disorderly and perhaps criminal action, would precede and explain the violent confrontation. Violence is seldom construed as an aspect of the creation of order. This essay explores the violence between Symons and Rands, and the martial conflict between the Dayrell and Temple families in Stowe that supplied its immediate motives, to uncover the violent contests inherent in the culture of gentility, an essential element in early modern English views of order.