POLITICAL HISTORY 



old forest boundaries and to the imposition of fines and compositions 

 upon persons who had encroached upon the forests. The old controversy 

 upon the limits of the forest of Windsor towards Surrey, supposed to 

 have been laid to rest under Edward III., was revived again. The Earl 

 of Holland, Chief Justice in Eyre of the forests south of Trent, was 

 directed to hold a justice seat at Bagshot in I632, 1 where Noy the 

 Attorney General claimed the whole Surrey bailiwick, that is the whole 

 county west of the Wey and north of the Hog's Back, as part of the 

 forest of Windsor. Several of the oldest inhabitants swore that to the 

 best of their remembrance in the two preceding reigns it had always 

 been reputed forest. Whereupon the Court unanimously affirmed this 

 to be the fact. It is not likely that the oldest inhabitants were very clear 

 in their minds about the difference between forest and the purlieus of the 

 forest, and probably this is another of the many cases in which usurpa- 

 tions of power had been accorded to previous sovereigns but were 

 opposed and treated as grievances when Charles tried to have them 

 confirmed. Not only the royal parks at Guildford, Woking and Byfleet, 

 but the district generally had been treated as forest, as when the inhabi- 

 tants had been compelled to remove their pigs for fear of upsetting His 

 Majesty King James when riding in this ' district of the forest.' 2 Forest 

 courts had been held within it. There is reference to a swaine moot at 

 Bagshot on September 14, i623. 8 Poaching in this neighbourhood was 

 commonly referred to as disorder in Windsor Forest. The inhabitants 

 had themselves taken refuge in the assumption that it was forest when 

 they wished to escape other burdens. They had excused themselves 

 from loans because so much of the county was taken up by forest and 

 parks.* In the late reign the county had petitioned against having to 

 carry wood for the king from Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire on the 

 ground of the many burdensome services in the county and of the large 

 proportion of the county which as part of the forest of Windsor was 

 exempt from these services, making the burden heavier to the rest. 6 It 

 is fairly plain that though since the old delimitation of the forests three 

 hundred years before Surrey had been properly excluded from the forest 

 of Windsor, yet the encroachments of the Crown had been more than 

 tacitly accepted for at least two generations. But the attempt to define 

 the encroachment ended, as is not uncommon, in its complete defeat. 

 Under the Long Parliament a commission was issued, under the Act for 

 inquiring into the boundaries of all forests, for an inquiry into those of 

 Windsor in Surrey. The commissioners included a majority in opposi- 

 tion to the Crown, and at the inquest held at Guildford on January 7, 

 1642, they found that in the twentieth year of King James the only 

 forest in Surrey was bounded by the pales of Guildford Park, and that as 

 the grant of the park by Charles to the Earl of Annandale in 1630 had 

 expressly declared it to be outside any forest whatever, the whole of the 



1 St. P. Dam. September 19, 1632, vol. ccxxiii. 



* Loseley MSS. June 8, 1608, i. 55. See above. * Ibid, date cited, ii. 97. 



* Supra, p. 71. 6 Loseley MSS. J. I. undated. 



403 



