40 History of the English Landed Interest. 



jurisdiction of the Crown, especially those " territories of woody 

 ground and pastures, replenished with beasts of venery or 

 chase, and containing verts for succour of the said beasts." 

 Unlike parks which were artificially enclosed by pale or wall, 

 their extent was merely defined by metes and bounds. Are we 

 then to suppose that the sovereign, like Alexander Selkirk, 

 was lord only of the fowl and the brute, and exercised his 

 seignorial rights over the hart, hind, hare, boar, and wolf of 

 the forest ; the buck, doe, fox, martin, and roe of the chase ; 

 and the coney, pheasant, and partridge of the warren ? ^ A 

 brief glance at the intricate provisions for policing and adminis- 

 tering these sylvan haunts will dissipate any such notion. 

 Their juridical machinery shows the same signs of mixed 

 popular and seignorial control as that of the manors in the open. 

 An offender against forest laws was accused in the Court of 

 the Woodmote, tried in that of the Swainmote, and sentenced 

 by that of the Justice seat. In the first-named assembly, the 

 seignorial officers, known as foresters, bring in their attach- 

 ments ; in the second, a jury of freeholders owe their suit and 

 service to the verderers, and give their verdicts for or against 

 prisoners ; and in the third, the vicegerent of royal justice 

 sits in judgment, and with the assistance of experts (also 

 nominees of the Crown) tries " omnia placita forestse." In 

 the business of these three courts, as well as in the various 

 duties of stewards, verderers, foresters, regarders, agisters, and 

 woodwards, it is not difficult to trace a close resemblance to 

 that partly royal, partly seignorial, partly popular control, 

 which necessitated in the less wooded manors the courts of 

 assize, baron and leet. At any rate, it is quite impossible to 

 reconcile so complete a system of police with a totally unin- 

 habited district; and it is no idle conjecture to assert that some 

 sporting Bretwalda with his armed band must have originally 

 penetrated the primaeval forests and established a limited con- 

 trol over the aborigines, both men and brutes, who composed a 

 kind of forest community. The Norman sovereigns, however, 

 in their passion for venery, imagined that they had the power 

 to convert into a " place of recreation," as Coke calls it, any 

 ' Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest, John Manwood, cap. v. p. 24, 



