Ny 
BRIEF. HISTORY OF THE ARBORICULTURE OF THE NEW FOREST. 27 
into the management of the land revenues of the Crown. This 
committee sat in 1848 and 1849, but, owing to the interven- 
tion of a general election, never made its report to Parliament. 
It was followed by a commission in 1850, the report and sub- 
report of which form a most valuable account and history of the 
Forest and of its state at that time. Innumerable abuses seem to 
have crept in, both as to the management by the Crown officers, 
and as to the exercise of rights of all kinds by commoners and 
those who purported to be such. As the commissioners expressed 
it, ‘‘the condition of the New Forest may truly be termed mere 
anarchy !” 
These inquiries culminated in an Act known as “The Deer 
Removal Act,” by which the whole constitution of the Forest was 
changed. The tendency of the previous inquiries, and the dis- 
position of Parliament, was to do away with such large areas of 
waste land, and to bring them into cultivation of some kind. 
About that date very many commons had been, and were being, 
enclosed all over the kingdom, and were brought into cultivation, 
in some cases to the great advantage of the class of small free- 
holder that was called into existence by the allotments of 
common ; in other cases with less success. The whole spirit of 
the time was eminently utilitarian, and the legislation on the 
New Forest followed in the same line. 
The first step was to abolish the deer, which from time im- 
memorial had been the chief raison d@étre of the Forest, but 
which, however picturesque and charming, were very costly to 
maintain, and no doubt had a deleterious effect on the morals of 
the population of the locality. In return for this right to main- 
tain an unlimited quantity of deer, and thus to exhaust the feed 
to the last blade of grass, the Crown proposed to take the right 
to enclose 14,000 acres of land for the purpose of planting, and 
when this was free from damage by cattle, to throw it open and 
re-enclose 14,000 acres more. This arrangement was opposed by 
the commoners, whose rights had been year by year coming more 
into evidence, and the area to be enclosed was cut down to 10,000 
acres, thus with the old 12,000 acres giving, without going into 
the question of the rolling power, an area of 32,000 acres to be 
enclosed for timber. 
The divided jurisdiction was also done away with ; the office of 
Lord Warden remained in abeyance, and the staff altogether was 
cut down to the most economical point. 
