A HISTORY OF HAMPSHIRE 



trespasses had been made in the king's forests during the unsettled times 

 of Henry I. and Stephen, but during the reign of Henry II. the forest 

 laws and their administration attained a special, well defined position side 

 by side with the common law, and special justices were appointed to 

 accompany the circuits of the 'justices in eyre,' who administered the 

 forest laws ; and a general visitation of all the royal forests throughout 

 the country was made by two justices in 1166. He promulgated a 

 code of forest laws known as the Assize of Woodstock in 1184. In this 

 he revived a more stringent application of the laws, though at the 

 same time he relaxed their cruel severity by substituting fines only 

 for the punishment of forest offences in place of the then existing 

 brutal penalties of mutilation by loss of eyes or cutting off hands and 

 feet. Even the clergy, untouched by English common law, were then 

 made subject to forest law, and the royal foresters were ordered to 

 apprehend them if found trespassing. On land included within a royal 

 forest a landowner could cut nothing except fuel in his own woods, and 

 such trees could only be felled in view of the forester. This Assize 

 of Woodstock is the first genuine enactment extant with regard to forest 

 laws and their administration. 



Henry's son, Richard I., had the Norman passion for the chase. 

 Had Coeur de Lion stayed in England in place of crusading, the forest 

 laws would probably have been very harshly and stringently adminis- 

 tered. After John ascended the throne matters drifted from bad to 

 worse, with the well-known effect that the great barons revolted in de- 

 fence of their own and of the people's rights, and forced him to sign the 

 Magna Charta in 1215, by which, for the first time, the most cruel and 

 oppressive of the provisions of the Norman forest laws and their more 

 recent developments were practically repealed (in sees. 44, 47, 48, 53). 



When the boy-king Henry III. succeeded to the throne in 1216 

 the question of placing forest legislation on a more satisfactory footing 

 was one of those uppermost in the mind of parliament, and the regent, 

 William Marschall, earl of Pembroke, on November 6, 1217, issued 

 a Charta de Foresta in the king's name. It gave the forest law a 

 more clearly defined and important position than hitherto, side by side 

 with the common law, and it removed some of the grossest abuses 

 under which the people had suffered and groaned throughout a century 

 and a half. Hitherto the penalty for killing a ' royal beast ' or stag 

 had cost a bondman his life, an unfree man his liberty, and a free- 

 man his freedom penalties almost as great as those exacted for the 

 murder of a human being. Even to chase a stag so as to make it pant 

 brought outlawry to a bondman and the loss of a year's liberty to a 

 freeman. The Forest Charter now provided that henceforth nor life nor 

 limb should be destroyed for killing the royal deer, but that only a fine 

 should be exacted, with imprisonment for a year and a day in default. 

 On his imprisonment coming to its end the offender had to find sureties 

 for future good behaviour, or else be banished out of England. Any lord, 

 lay or spiritual, when passing through a forest, was free to take two 



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