120 EPPIKG FOREST. 



of London. Their action was greatly facilitated and 

 promoted by that of the Commissioners of Woods and 

 Forests, who, in pursuance of the recommendations of 

 Lord Duncan's Committee, and without any authority 

 from Parliament, offered to sell to the Lords of Manors 

 the forestal rights of the Crown over the waste lands of 

 Epping Forest, at the rate of about 5 per acre. The 

 effect of this was to extinguish these rights, and to leave 

 the Lords of Manors, who bought them, free to deal with 

 their Commoners, or to inclose in spite of them a 

 process which was practically impossible so long as the 

 Crown rights were enforced. 



The Lords of Manors of about a half of the Forest 

 availed themselves of this offer, and bought up and 

 extinguished the forestal rights of the Crown over their 

 respective Manors. The more sales of this kind that 

 were effected, the greater became the difficulty of main- 

 taining the Crown rights, where they still subsisted in 

 law. The Department further directed that the deer 

 should be killed down ; and, although the deer were 

 never quite destroyed, the district ceased practically to 

 be a forest in the legal sense of the term. The sale 

 of the Crown rights over 3,513 acres produced 15,793. 



The process of inclosure was further facilitated by 

 the fact that, some years previously, the hereditary office 

 of Lord Warden had, through his wife, the last repre- 

 sentative of the Earls of Tylney, fallen to Mr. Wellesley 

 Pole,* later Lord Murnington, a dissolute spendthrift, 



* This person, whose memory still survives in the well-known 

 line of " Rejected Addresses" 



' Long may Long Wellesley Tylney Long Pole live," 



