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Initially I was puzzled at George Duke translating "venaison" as "deer", as I understood that venison was not from a word for a live deer but meant meat from a deer hunted with dogs in particular. Eventually I got round to looking it up in a French-English/English-French dictionary, which for the French "venaison" gave only the English "venison" and for the English "deer" only the French "cerf", though adding that "daim" is a one-word translation for the English phrase "fallow deer". I can understand why referring to eating "cerf" might not have caught on in the largely oral society of mediaeval England as it sounded too like "serf", i.e., human livestock. Anyhow, in the case of deer meat the French word for the actual animal did not catch on, merely a word that already meant specifically the meat and even more specifically meat acquired in a particular way.