The Xt'ic Forrxt .- its History and its 



enjoyed, too, rights of pasturing cattle, feeding swine, and 

 cutting timber.* All this, as we have seen, went on as before, 

 not so much, but still the same, in the New Forest. Manors, 

 too, with the exception of being subject to Forest Law, remained 



* In the Charta de Forests of Canute (Manwood, f. 3, sect. -27) 

 mention is made in the forests of horses, cows, and wild goats which are 

 all protected ; and from sect. 28 it is plain that, under certain limitations, 

 people might cut fuel. These, with other privileges, such as killing game 

 on their own lands (see sect. xxx. f. 4) for, by theory, all game was the 

 King's were compensations given to the forester for being subject to Forest 

 Law. 



Further, from the Chart i de Foresta of Henry III. (M-mwood, ff. 6-11), 

 we find that persons had houses and farms, and even woods, in the very 

 centre of the King's forests ; and the charter provides that they may there, 

 on their own lands, build nvlls on the forest streams, sink wells, and dig 

 marl-pits, referring, most probably, in the last case, to the Xew Forest, 

 where marl has been used, from time immemorial, to manure the land ; and, 

 further, that in their own woods, even though in the forest, they might 

 keep hawks, and go hawking. (See f. 7, sects, xii., xiii.) 



It shows, too, that there was a population who gained their livelihood, 

 as to this day, by huckstering, buying and selling small quantities of timber, 

 making brushes, and dealing in bark and coal, which last article evidently 

 points to the Forest of Dean. (F. 7, sect, xiv.) 



We must not imagine that the Charta de Foresta of Henry m. was 

 entirely a series of new privileges. They were, with some notable excep- 

 tions, simply those rights which had been received from the earliest times 

 in compensation for some of the hardships of the Forest Laws, and which 

 bad been wrested away, probably by Richard or John, but which had 

 never been granted to those who dwelt outside the Forest. (On this point see 

 especially " Ordinatio Foreste," 33rd Edward I., Statutes of the Realm, vol. i. 

 p. 144. And again, "Ordinatio Foreste," 34th Edward I., sect, vi., same 

 volume, p. 149, where the rights of pasturage are re-allowed to those who 

 have lost it by the recent perambulation made in the twenty-ninth year of 

 the King's reign.) 



I think we may, therefore, gain from these clauses, especially when 

 taken in conjunction with those of the Charta de Foresta of Canute, a tole- 

 rably correct picture of an ancient forest that it consisted not merely of 



