CHAPTER X. 



EARLY HISTORY. 



Were the forester here now right " 



Thy words should like thee ill. 



He has with him young men three, 



They be archers of this contre, 



The King to serve at will, 



To keep the deer both day and night. 



King Edward and the Shepherd. 



'i WO main causes seem to have tended to the 

 preservation of the red deer in the West, while in 

 other parts of England they became extinct. In 

 the first place the nucleus of the wild rough country 

 which they have made their own consisted of royal 

 forest, and, in the second place, the existence of a 

 pack of staghounds. 



On Dartmoor (also a joyal forest), the deer were 

 destroyed because of the damage they did to the 

 farm lands in the neighbourhood — after the Dukes 

 of Bedford ceased to keep staghounds at Tavistock, 

 and a similar fate befell the herds in almost all the 

 forests and chaces in the kingdom. 



Gilbert White, writing of Woolmer Forest, where 

 the deer had then recently been exterminated, says : 

 "Though large herds of deer do much harm to the 



