350 GAME LAWS. 
sentments. The forest codes of the medizeval kings, and the local 
“ coutumes ” of feudalism, contained many severe and even in- 
human provisions, adopted rather for the preservation of game 
than from any enlightened views of the more important fune- 
tions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis informs us that William 
the Conqueror destroyed sixty parishes and drove out their in- 
habitants, in order that he might turn their lands into a forest,* 
to be reserved as a hunting-ground for himself and his posterity, 
and he punished with death the killing of a deer, wild boar, or 
even a hare. His successor, William Rufus, according to the 
Listoire des Ducs de Normandie et des Rois @ Angleterre, p. 67, 
“ was hunting one day in a new forest, which he had caused to be 
made out of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when, by 
mischance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyreus de 
Rois [Sir Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed 
the beast, and slew the king, who was beyond it. And in 
this very same forest, his brother Richard ran so hard against 
a tree that he died of it. And men commonly said that these 
things were because they had so laid waste and taken the said 
parishes.” 
These barbarous acts, as Bonnemére observes,} were simply 
the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, 
and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. “The 
* The American reader must be reminded that, in the language of the chase 
and of the English law, a ‘‘forest” is not necessarily a wood. Any large 
extent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the pleasures of 
the chase, and allowed to clothe itself with a spontaneous growth, serving as 
what is technically called ‘‘ cover” for wild animals, is, in the dialects I have 
mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the Norman kingsafforested the grounds 
referred to in the text, it is not to be supposed that they planted them with 
trees, though the protection afforded to them by the game laws would, if cattle 
had been kept out, soon have converted them into real woods. 
+ Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 190. The work of Bonnemére is of great value 
to those who study the history of medieval Europe from a desire to know its 
real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to sustain a false 
and dangerous theory. Bonnemére is one of the few writers who, like Miche- 
let, have been honest enough and bold enough to speak the truth with regard 
to the relations between the church and the people in the Middle Ages. 
