Ancient English Forest Laws. 



Forestry in this country, having, by the vast superiority of the demand 

 for timber over our home-grown supplies, produced an enormous import 

 of foreign wood which we cannot possibly dispense with, and would 

 rather have increased, our old English forest laws have become 

 rather rusty, there being no necessity to furbish them up, to make 

 them suit the requirements of the present times, as we do not now 

 depend to any appreciable extent upon home-grown timber. Yet the 

 laws by which our forests were protected in bygone days cannot 

 fail to be of interest. However tyrannous in some respects the ordi- 

 nances respecting forests might be before the Conquest, that event no 

 doubt increased the sufferings of the English a thousandfold, from the 

 rigorous manner in which they were forced to provide for the sport and 

 diversion of the victorious invader. The devastation caused by the 

 creation of the New Forest in Hampshire was so excessive and cruel, 

 that, notwithstanding the concurrent testimony of contemporary histo- 

 rians, it has not always been credited by later writers. William the 

 Conqueror did not plant the New Forest, but afforested a large dis- 

 trict of wood, hill, and champaign, at that time peopled and under 

 cultivation, and by depopulating the villages which it contained, and 

 diverting its lands from tillage, he rendered it fit for hunting, regard- 

 less of the misery by which his amusement was purchased. Holin- 

 shed denounces William's penal forest laws as a " pestilent policie 

 of a spitefull mind." Spelman has collected the several judgments 

 with which the Conqueror's family was believed to have been visited, 

 within the precincts of the New Forest, on account of his oppressive 

 conduct. Eichard I. renewed severe laws against transgressors in his 

 forests, putting out their eyes and inflicting still more horrible punish- 

 ments, as in the reign of his great-grandfather. Cutting off hands and 

 feet was also practised as a punishment for the transgression of 

 forest laws. John, in the early part of his reign, exercised the forest 

 laws with unmitigated severity. So tenaciously did the king cling to 

 his rights that a sentence in Magna Charta gave him the same sove- 

 reignty over the forests which his father possessed. Whereas, in the 

 Carta de Forestd of Henry III., the king agrees, among other things 

 to a new perambulation of the forests, to disafforest such portions as 

 appear to have been unjustly afforested ; more especially all such as 



