20 THE CHILTERN COUNTRY. 
lingering about it. So late as the time of Queen Elizabeth 
Drayton could write, in his Polyolbion— 
‘Here (in the Chiltern hills) if you beat a bush, ’tis odds you start a thief.’’ 
The ancient office of Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds, though 
useful for political purposes, is now of the smallest possible im- 
portance to the Chilterners themselves. The original steward 
was some valiant knight—some sturdy cavalier who willingly 
resigned the glorious career of a soldier abroad for the less 
honourable but more useful life of a policeman at home; whose 
duty it was to protect peaceful citizens who had occasion to 
journey through its recesses, and to keep in check the marauding 
villains who infested it. He and his myrmidons, however, seem 
to have made little head against the nuisance. The Abbot of St. 
Albans was at last obliged to take the matter in hand, for the 
security of travellers to and from his Abbey. First, he proceeded 
to cut down as much of the forest as possible—more, I imagine, 
in his own vicinity than in South Buckinghamshire; then to 
make convenient roads, and then to hand over one of his manors to 
two stout soldiers (I forget their names), to be possessed by them 
on condition of their assisting the Steward of the Hundreds in 
his exertions to preserve the peace of the neighbourhood.* 
Such is the story as you read it in the ‘‘Lives of the Twenty-three 
Abbots,” by Matthew Paris. There is abundant confirmation of 
the main facts which the old chronicler relates of the Chiltern 
district from other sources; but I am a little sceptical as to the 
additional inhabitants whom he avers to have shared the posses- 
sion of the forest with the marauding parties aforesaid—namely, 
wolves. bears, and wild boars, whom these feudal police were 
also bound, as far as possible, to exterminate. So late as 1368, 
we find a tenure in the Five Rolls for the destruction of ‘‘ wolves 
foxes, martrons, cats, and other vermin” in the county of Buck- 
ingham; but it is probable that wolves had been extinct long 
before that period, in this portion of the island. A wild boar, 
I believe, was hunted and killed near Penn as late as the last 
century; but I am not able to give any authentic particulars. 
E. J. Payne. 
(To be continued.) 
* The abbot was Leofstan; the knights (there were three instead of two), 
Thurnoth, Walder, and Thurman; and the manor, Flamstead, in Herts. 
William the Conqueror took it away from them, and gave it to one of his 
own adyenturers. 
