xxvi INTRODUCTION 



" In the times of the Britons the whole of Great Britain was 

 replenished with all sorts of game, and the Britons, who lived in a 

 wild and pastoral manner without enclosing or improving their 

 grounds, derived much of their subsistence from the chase, which 

 they all enjoyed in common. But when husbandry took place 

 under the Saxon government and lands began to be cultivated, 

 improved, and enclosed, the beasts naturally fled into the woody 

 and desert tracts, which were called forests, and not having 

 been disposed of in the first distribution of lands, were therefore 

 held to belong to the crown. These were filled with great plenty 

 of game, which our royal sportsmen reserved for their own diver- 

 sion on pain of a pecuniary forfeiture on the part of such as inter- 

 fered with their sovereign. But every freeman had the full liberty 

 of sporting upon his own territories, provided he abstained from the 

 king's forests. However, upon the Norman conquest, a new doc- 

 trine took place, and the right of pursuing and taking all beasts of 

 chase or venery, and such other animals as were accounted game, was 

 held to belong to the king, or to such only as were authorized under 

 him. The right thus newly vested in the crown was exerted with 

 the utmost rigour at and after the time of the Norman establish- 

 ment, not only in the ancient forests, but in the new ones which the 

 Conqueror made by laying together vast tracks of country depopu- 

 lated for that purpose, and reserved solely for the king's royal diver- 

 sion, in which were exercised the most horrid tyrannies and oppres- 

 sions, under the colour of forest law, for the sake of preserving 

 the beasts of chase, to kill any of which, within the limits of the 

 forest, was as penal as the death of a man. And in pursuance of the 

 same principle, King John laid a total interdict upon the winged 

 as well as the four-footed creation, 'capturam avium per totam 

 Angliam interdixit.' The cruel and insupportable hardships which 

 these forest laws created to the subject occasioned our ancestors 

 to be as zealous for their reformation as for the relaxation of the 

 feudal rigours and other exactions introduced by the Norman 

 dynasty, and accordingly we find the immunities of carte de forests 

 as warmly contended for and extorted from the King with as much 

 difficulty as those of Magna Charta itself. By this charter, con- 

 firmed in Parliament, many forests were disafforested or stripped 

 of their oppressive privileges and regulations were made in 

 the regimen of such as remained particularly, killing the king's 

 deer was made no longer a capital offence, but only punished 

 by a fine, imprisonment, or abjuration of the realm. And by a 

 variety of subsequent statutes, together with the long acquiescence 

 of the crown without exercising the forest laws, this prerogative is 

 now become no longer a grievance to the subject " (Blackstone, 

 Commentaries vol. ii. p. 415). 



The great importance of wood to society, and the rapid decrease of 

 forests in populous countries, if particular care is not taken of them, 



