LETT. VII.] NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 19 



and sanguinary Act called the Black Act (9 Geo. I. c. 22), which 

 comprehends more felonies than any law that ever was framed 

 before. And therefore. Dr. Hoadley, the Bishop of Winchester, 

 when urged to re-stock Waltham- chase, refused, from a motive 

 worthy of a prelate, replying that " it had done mischief enough 

 already." 



Our old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet : it was 

 but a little while ago that they used to recount, over their ale, 

 the exploits of their youth ; such as watching the pregnant hind 

 to her lair, and, when the calf was dropped, paring its feet with 

 a penknife to the quick to prevent its escape, till it was large 

 and fat enough to be killed; the shooting at one of their 

 neighbours with a bullet in a turnip-field by moonshine, mis- 

 taking him for a deer ; and the losing a dog in the following 

 extraordinary manner : Some fellows, suspecting that a calf 

 new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of thick fern, went, 

 with a lurcher, to surprise it ; when the parent hind rushed out 

 of the brake, and, taking a vast spring with all her feet close 

 together, pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it short 

 in two. 



Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of 

 rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry places ; but 

 these being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on account of their 

 buiTows, when they came to take away the deer they permitted 

 the country people to destroy them all. 



Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregulari- 

 ties are removed, are of considerable service to neighbourhoods 

 that verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf 

 for their firing ; with fuel for the burning their lime ; and with 

 ashes for their grasses ; and by maintaining their geese and their 

 stock of young cattle at little or no expense. 



The manor-farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted 

 claim, I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), 

 of turning all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons, 

 bidentibus exceptis. For this privilege the owner of that estate 

 used to pay to the king annually seven bushels of oats. In the 

 Holt Forest, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up 

 till lately, no sheep are admitted. The reason, I presume, being 



