342 GAME LAWS. 



torial term of the young persons, by the religious rites to be cele- 

 brated in the chapels, was doubtless the consideration which 

 operated most powerfully on the mind of the king ; and Europe 

 lost a great example for the sake of a mass. 



The desolation and depopulation, resulting from the extension 

 of the forest and the enforcement of the game laws, induced 

 several of the French kings to consent to some relaxation of the 

 severity of these latter. Francis I., however, revived their bar- 

 barous provisions, and, according to Bonnem^re, even so good a 

 monarch as Henry lY. re-enacted them, and " signed the sentence 

 of death upon peasants guilty of having defended their fields 

 against devastation by wild beasts." " A fine of twenty livres," 

 he continues, " was imposed on every one shooting at pigeons, 

 which, at that time, swooped down by thousands upon the new- 

 sown fields and devoured the seed. But let us count even this a 

 progress, for we have seen that the murder of a pigeon had been 

 a capital crime." * 



'Not only were the slightest trespasses on the forest domain — 

 the cutting of an oxgoad, for instance — severely punished, but 

 game animals were still sacred when they had wandered from 

 their native precincts and were ravaging the fields of the peas- 

 antry. A herd of deer or of wild boars often consumed or trod 

 down a harvest of grain, the sole hope of the year for a whole 

 family ; and the simple driving out of such animals from this 

 costly pasturage brought dire vengeance on the head of the 

 rustic who had endeavored to save his children's bread from 

 their voracity. " At aU times," says Paul Louis Courier, speak- 

 ing in the name of the peasants of Chambord, in the " Simple 

 Discours," " the game has made war upon us. Paris was block- 

 aded eight hundred years by the deer, and its environs, now so 

 rich, so fertile, did not yield bread enough to support the game- 



the priests were dexterous enough both to secure to themselves the amount of 

 the fine, and to extort from Louis large additional grants to carry out the pur- 

 poses to which they devoted the money. " And thqugh the king did take the 

 moneys," says the chronicler, " he put them not into his treasury, but turned 

 them into good works ; for he builded therewith the maison-Dieu of Pontoise, 

 and endowed the same with rents and lands ; also the schools and the dor- 

 mitory of the friars preachers of Paris, and the monastery of the Minorite 

 friars." 

 * Histoire des Pay sans, ii., p. 200. 



