160 Cranborne Chase. 



Deer Hunters and Deer Stealers. 



A good many anecdotes have been preserved in Mr. Chafin's 

 little book upon this part of the history o£ the Chase, but we must 

 be satisfied with two or three of them. 



It was, he says, about the beginning of the last century (1700) 

 that unlawful deer killing began to be much the fashion. It began, 

 not with the ordinary low-class poacher, but with persons of a 

 better class of life. In fact it began with the gentry, who in order 

 to assert their supposed rights used to assemble in parties to enforce 

 those rights. I may mention, by the way, that the same kind of 

 thing was common elsewhere. On the breaking up of the large 

 forest of Selwood, when a part of it, by proper legal process, had 

 been added to the Longleat estate, more than two hundred years 

 ago, parties of small landowners and others of the neighbourhood, 

 nevertheless, persisted in maintaining that they had been deprived 

 of some right, and were frequently invading Longleat Park with 

 hound and horn, in order to uphold their lost privileges. 



Mr. Chafin tells us that he had an uncle much addicted to this 

 sport, who was so often detected and so often fined a heavy penalty 

 that his elder brother was obliged to interfere and put a stop to his 

 career in good time. So long as the parties were of that class of 

 life, able to pay the money penalty, they were dignified by the name 

 of deer-hunters, but when, by an Act of Parliament in 1736, a 

 second offence of deer-killing was made felony, and offenders of 

 all ranks were liable to seven years' transportation, the gentlemen 

 thought it time to leave off the dangerous sport, and it fell into the 

 hands of the common poacher. Deer hunting became deer stealing. 

 No one famous in forest history is ever likely to rival the celebrated 

 Robin Hood, whose doings in merry Sherwood are immortalized in 

 so many of our old ballads. But Cranborne Chase had a hero — in 

 a way. Mr. Chafin has related the adventures of a gentleman with 

 whom he was well acquainted in the early part of his life, who was 

 the bold leader of a band of deer hunters, and in the frontispiece of 

 his little book he has given us the portrait of this gentleman and 

 his merry men, in the costume of his calling. fSee the plate}) 

 * The original drawing was made by one Byng, assistant to Sir Godfrey 



