130 History of the Ejiglish Landed Interest. 



decrease under the hands of such new masters ; on the contrary, 

 it increased, for the king's passion for venery led him into 

 wholesale acts of agricultural devastation. The afforesting of 

 nearly 3,000 square miles in Hampshire was but the chief and 

 culminating act of a long series. This monster hunting-ground 

 absorbed into its capacious maw manors and cultivated corn 

 lands as well as towns, villages, and hamlets ; and traditional 

 names still mark the sites of some of those thirty-six parish 

 churches which the king's ungovernable desire had turned 

 into sylvan haunts of the wild boar, or coverts for the red deer. 

 The Norman aristocracy followed their king's example, and for 

 the same purposes often drove the workers of the soil from their 

 meadows, tillage fields, and pasture lands. The forest laws 

 inflicted the fearful penalties of mutilation or death on man or 

 dog if caught in pursuit of the deer. No person outside the 

 select circle of the nobility was allowed to indulge in the sport 

 of hawking. He must have been a bold fellow who would 

 have run the gauntlet of a watchful host of wardens, verder- 

 ers, foresters, agisters, regarders, keepers, bailifts, beadles, and 

 other forest police for the sake of a juicy venison steak ; nor 

 was the game worth the candle when the detected possession 

 of a falcon brought its owner before the dread Justice in Eyre 

 of the forest. But when, what cannot but be termed Heaven's 

 vengeance, aroused by the united wails of homeless peasants, 

 maimed outlaws, and cureless priests, had struck down the red 

 king on the very site of his father's crimes, the forest laws 

 became reduced in severity, and properly tabulated by the 

 Charter of 1217. After that, armless men and dogs mutilated 

 by " lawing," were rarer objects of pity ; lands adapted for 

 tillage escaped the king's afforestation schemes ; and both the 

 laymen and clergy of the middle class were allowed to halloo 

 their spar-hawks upon the quarry without incessant dread of 

 the swainmote. 



When the landed gentry of this period were engaged neither 

 in warfare nor the chase, they were, no doubt, practising such 

 games and warlike exercises as were best suited for the de- 

 velopment of strength and agility. Thus fencing, buckler 

 play, and tilting at the ring or quintain, afforded a rigidity of 



