66 THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



probably long before, with the " deer leap," still talked of 

 on the Common outside the Covert. 



" The whole south-western peninsula (if the reader will 

 take the Avon for the western boundary of it), comprising 

 more than 90,100 acres, was forest. 



" Such was the state of Hants in the Norman days. I 

 am aware that forest, in the language of the time, meant 

 rather a Chase, a place excluded from cultivation (from 

 the Latin ' foris.' outside), than necessarily a wooded place. 

 In all probability the proportion of woodland in the New 

 Forest to the barren moor, was not larger then than it is 

 now. The greater part of the soil at present is as unsuited 

 for timber as it is for pasture or corn, and for thousands 

 of acres the bare heath has not a vestige of any former 

 trees upon it. There is, however, little danger of ex- 

 aggeration in saying that the Forests of Hants, as the early 

 Norman sovereigns found them, covered a large proportion 

 of the county ; and as the Romans had found them, formed 

 one great and almost impenetrable wood, a natural defence 

 against the Gauls. 



" It need not be supposed that the intervening period 

 was insufficient for the partial clearing of these forests if 

 they had been so extensive as we have suggested. The 

 Andred Weald itself disappeared in the course of one 

 century in the furnaces of the iron-smelter,* and earlier 

 still, protecting laws and severe penalties showed that the 

 denudation of the country of its wood was felt to be pro- 

 ceeding too rapidly. ' If any man burn a log in a wood, 

 he must pay sixteen shillings,' say Ine's Laws, 'for fire is 

 a thief.' No man by Canute's laws, might cut brushwood 

 without permission in a King's forest, and there was a 

 heavy fine of twenty shillings for the destruction of any 

 tree ' that gave food to the beasts.'t We have only to 

 look at the improvident haste with which vast woods are 

 cleared away in modern colonies to see how soon the face 

 of a country may be changed in this respect ; and how 



* Pearson's Historical Maps. t Same, page 50. 



