The Story of our English Woodlands. 41 



part of the land wliicli tliey pleased. Though this was a 

 claim immediately challenged, soon abandoned, and ultimately 

 abolished, no infringement of royal privileges over the primaeval 

 forest were allowed. To encroach by building on the forest was 

 the offence known as purprestre, and to convert forests into 

 arable land was that of assarting, both being strictly prohibited 

 and severely punished. Even where a right to stub up the 

 trees was obtained by special royal licence, the purlieu, as the 

 land thus cleared was called, remained partially subject to 

 forest laws in the case of all other persons save the beneficiary 

 of the grant. There is an interesting instance of this as late as 

 1800 described in Young's Aimah of Agriculture ^ by a writer 

 evidently unlearned in forest laws. A certain Mr. Conyers 

 seems to have been a tenant of assart over 400 acres in Epping 

 Forest. It was, as a purlieu, open to the deer, and subject to 

 certain rights and customs which precluded the possibility of 

 its cultivation. In fact, even for arboriculture it was worthless, 

 because the poor, in exercising their prescriptive rights to the 

 underwood, used to mangle and destroy Mr. Con^'ers' young 

 trees. He, however, coaxed the people out of these rights b}'' 

 offering to collect for and deliver to them their firing, and 

 having thus freed his land from their trespass soon obtained a 

 fine crop of oaks. 



On that portion of the wooded wastes which bordered on 

 the villages, these popular rights were not only more marked, 

 but more detrimental to arboriculture — a circumstance which 

 accounts for the defective legislation of the earlier period deal- 

 ing with young and improvable woods. Since cattle were 

 allowed amongst the plantations before the trees were suffi- 

 ciently advanced to be out of their reach, the tendency of the 

 Statute Book was to increase the term during which rights ot 

 pasturage were in abeyance ; but each fresh Act was carefully 

 worded so as to show that only popular necessities induced 

 the legislature to interfere with popular rights. 



As the land became more and more inhabited, the wants of 

 housebote, ploughbote, etc., increased, while at the same time 

 the supply of timber was diminished. The Act, therefore, that 

 ^ Annals, v. 37, p. 50. 



