Sinai Park. 
By HENRY A. RYE. 
READ BEFORE THE Society, Frespruary 1871p, 1910. 
Needwood Forest was one of the Royal forests of England, and 
the Abbot of Burton-on-Trent and the Prior of Tutbury held special 
privileges and peculiar rights in the same. Let us start with a clear 
idea of what was the meaning of a forest, so many have such wild 
ideas. I well remember a friend of mine, who raved about the 
iniquity of the great deer forests in Scotland, who came to visit me 
when I was under the Duke of Sutherland and who, going with me 
to visit one of the forest shooting lodges, after a drive of ten miles 
through heather, rock and peat-bog, asked, ‘‘ When do we come to 
the deer forest?” My reply was, ‘* We are in the centre of it now.” 
‘But where are the trees, and grass lands”? I replied, ‘In your 
imagination. Is this not grand land to clear and make into small 
holdings for the crofters?” Needless to say his views of settling 
small holders on the great deer forests of Sutherland underwent a 
great change. 
A “ forest’’ in Norman Plantagenet and early Tudor days was a 
portion of territory consisting of extensive waste lands and including 
a certain amount of both woodlands and pasture circumscribed by 
defined metes and bounds within which the right of hunting was 
reserved exclusively to the King, and was subject to a special code 
of laws administered by local as well as central ministers. 
Much learning might have been spared had the true meaning of 
forest been grasped in trying to prove that forests were vast woods 
with rich grassy glades, 
