FORMER GAME LAWS. 241 



" All this injustice and partiality, all this absurdity and 

 grievance, would be effectually banished, were the whole 

 code of the game laws repealed, and a new law enacted, 

 founded on the principles of justice and equity ; whereby 

 the absolute property of the game should be vested, as of 

 common right it ought to be, in the proprietor of the land 

 it can be killed on, whether such land be a rood or an 

 acre, whether a garden, a field, or a wood. It will appear 

 from the above quotation from the learned and laborious 

 Blackstone, that this would be nothing more than a re- 

 vival of the ancient Saxon or British law, which for ages 

 had thus operated before the inruption of the Norman 

 conquerors, by whose fatal success all the excellent and 

 free institutions of Anglo-Saxon policy were swept away, 

 and on the ruins of which those tyrannous maxims of the 

 feudal and military system were firmly established. A 

 reasonable objection to this repeal can scarcely be started; 

 and the writer of this essay well remembers it as the 

 decided opinion of that illustrious peer, the late Marquis 

 of Rockingham, the situation of whose principal mansion, 

 in the vicinity of populous towns, rendered all attention to 

 the preservation of the game from poachers almost a joke, 

 on the principles of the game laws, which, in addition to 

 its obvious equity, might probably create a wish in him for 

 the restoration of the more just and rational Saxon law." 



Well nigh another century has since passed ; and the 

 game laws are in an unsatisfactory state still ! 



