238 THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



kill, take, or hurt, any wild beast or bird, within his own 

 ground; and if any one did so, he was liable to be 

 punished for the same. This law continued till Canute 

 the Dane came to the English crown ; who, it appears, 

 appointed certain forests and chases, and fixed their limits 

 the first year of his reign." 



" A Juris-consult," in the first number of The Farmers' 

 Magazine, published in the last year of the last century on 

 Manorial Claims, thus speaks of the claim or right to the 

 game of a manor or district : 



"The game of a manor, i.e., deer, hares, partridges, 

 pheasants, and moor game or grouse, &c., was, at a remote 

 period, considered as the property of the crown, but granted 

 with the manor itself to an inferior lord, under the ancient 

 forest laws, and has been, for many centuries, a fertile 

 source of strife and discord to the more spirited inhabitants 

 of this and other countries. The regulations concerning 

 this subject of legislative wisdom, might seem indeed to 

 have been invented with no other view; for though it 

 were not probable that the lord of a manor, so granted, 

 would have any dispute with his superior or granter, yet 

 the opportunities of harassing his inferiors, by efforts of 

 petty tyranny, were such, as perpetually to embitter the 

 minds, and indeed ultimately to debase the character, of 

 both the oppressor and oppressed. After a part of the 

 lands within the manors had been alienated so generally 

 in fee simple, during the reign of Henry VII. and in sub- 

 sequent times, the purchasers of such lands, or their heirs, 

 now become freeholders, very naturally conceiving them- 

 selves interested in the game, in proportion to their 

 acquisitions of landed property, except in cases of free 

 warren ; the difficulties of preserving the monopoly of 

 this object of diversion and luxury, in the hands of the 

 manorial lords, were much increased. Hence arose the 

 apparent necessity of applying to the legislature for a new 

 code of game laws, the partiality and injustice of which 

 are not more glaring than their absurdity. 



