A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



by reserving for themselves the amusement of the higher chase after red 

 deer in certain specified tracts. And when these powerful, masterful 

 men having great local influence became the thegns and earls of the 

 Saxon kings titles originally not of dignity but of service the rights 

 they had usurped from the common folk were, a fortiori, entitled to be 

 exercised by their overlord and sovereign, the king. As the king became 

 more fully representative of his nation he no doubt exercised these rights 

 of the chase, for the hunting of red deer and wild boar has ever been the 

 most royal of sports. 



Thus in Hampshire, as in other parts of the Saxon kingdoms, the 

 royal appropriation of large tracts of land, and especially of great stretches 

 of woodlands within which big game was most plentiful tracts which 

 ultimately became known as forests, a name having a very definite legal 

 meaning seems to have taken place as early as the Heptarchy (455-827 

 A.D.) ; and when Egbert became the ' first king of all England ' (827 

 839 A.D.), he found himself the overlord of many such forests in different 

 parts of England. The process of the formation of ' king's land ' (terra 

 regis) and ' king's wood ' (si/va regis] or ' royal hunting-grounds,' which 

 later on became the ' forest ' (foresta) of the Norman kings, cannot be 

 accurately described. Most likely the royal demesnes and the royal woods 

 of the Saxon and the Danish kings often included parts of the original 

 ' Folc-land ' ' the Land of the vulgar People, who had no Estate therein, 

 but held the same under such Rents and Services as were accustomed or 

 agreed, at the Will only of their lord the Thane.' 1 Long previous to 

 this time, however, the great economic importance of the woodlands for 

 the pannage of swine, apart from the amusements of hunting, was recog- 

 nized in the laws of King Ine, the earliest extant specimens of West- 

 Saxon legislation, published between 690 and 693 A.D., by which 

 penalties were imposed on the burning of trees lest the woods should be 

 destroyed by fire, while the value of a tree was estimated according to 

 the number of swine that could find shelter under it. So far as hunting 

 was concerned it seems that, from being exercised first of all in common 

 by all, it gradually became restricted after the formation of royal hunting- 

 grounds, when a freeholder still had the right of the higher chase after 

 big game upon his own land, but was forbidden to follow it into or upon 

 the king's woods. The lower chase could still, however, down to the 

 time of the Norman Conquest, be enjoyed by the holder of the land even 

 if it formed part of the royal hunting-grounds within which the higher 

 chase was reserved for the king. That such was the case seems clear even 

 from the supposititious forest laws of Canute the Dane (101735 A.D.), 

 now known to have been Norman forgeries, as well as from the customs 

 known to have been existing from then down to the time of Edward the 

 Confessor (1042-66 A.D.). There can be no doubt that definite laws 

 relating to hunting and woodlands were in force during both the Saxon 

 and the Danish periods, but only untenanted tracts appear to have been 



1 Cowell' Law Dictionary (1708), article on ' Folc-land.' 

 414 



