History of the Forest 279 



The first idea of the forest really belonging to any one 

 came with the conquering Romans. According to their 

 law, all the unsettled portion of a conquered country be- 

 came the property of the ruler, and so the forest became the 

 property of the new kings. They had little use for it ex- 

 cept as hunting grounds and managed it accordingly. 

 They protected the game, making it a greater offense to 

 kill a deer than a man, but they did not interfere with the 

 use of the forest for fuel and pasturage. This privilege 

 was the only source of the peasants' wood supply, de- 

 pendent entirely upon the favor of the king. 



The king granted much of this forest land to his nobles, 

 who in turn created game preserves and cared nothing for 

 the forest itself: The peasants continued to secure their 

 fuel and pasturage in the same way, and the continuance 

 of this practice finally constituted it a right, which the 

 nobles no longer had the power to take away. 



In spite of this free use of the forest that the villages en- 

 joyed, they suffered from a shortage of wood at a very early 

 date. The supply in the immediate neighborhood of the 

 towns was used up and the difficulty of transporting such 

 bulky material more than a few miles made the vast areas 

 of forest on the frontiers almost useless to the towns, - 

 it was out of their reach. There were no railroads nor 

 adequate road systems of any kind ; therefore the towns 

 on the rivers were the only ones which could draw on the 

 timber supply of distant regions. This was an important 

 factor in the rapid growth of the river towns. With the 

 growth of the towns the timber famine became more 

 acute. 



It is interesting to read some of the laws that were passed 



