340 GAME LAWS. 



the local " coutumes " of feudalism, contained many severe and 

 even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for the preservation of 

 game than from any enlightened views of the more important 

 functions of the woods. Ordericus Yitalis informs us that Will- 

 iam the Conqueror destroyed sixty parishes and drove out their 

 inhabitants, 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 Histoire des Dues de Normandie el des Rois d^ Angleterre^ 

 p. 6Y, " 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." 

 Tliese barbarous acts, as Bonnemere observes,f were simply 

 the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, 

 and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. " The 

 death of a hare," says our author, " was a hanging matter, the 

 murder of a plover a capital crime. Death was inflicted on those 

 who spread nets for pigeons ; wretches who had drawn a bow 

 upon a stag were to be tied to the animal ahve ; and among 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 ex- 

 tent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the pleasures of the 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 vdld animals, is, in the dialects I have 

 mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the Norman kings afforested 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. 



f Histoire des Paysans, ii., p. 190. The work of Bonnemere is of great 

 value to those who study the history of mediisval Europe from a desire to 

 know its real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to sus- 

 tain a false and dangerous theory. Bonnemere is one of the few writers who, 

 like Michelet, 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. 



