NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 21 



Our old race of deer-stealers are hardly extinct yet : it was but a 

 little while ago that, over their ale, they used to recount the exploits 

 of their youth ; such as watching the pregnant hind to her lair, and, 

 when the calf was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the 

 quick to prevent its escape, till it was large and fat enough to be 

 killed ; the shooting at one of their neighbours with a bullet in a 

 turnip-field by moonshine, mi staking him for a deer; and the losing 

 a dog in the following extraordinary manner : Some fellows, sus- 

 pecting that a calf new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of 

 thick fern, went, with a lurcher, to surprise it ; when the parent- 

 hind rushed out of the brake, and, taking a vast spring with all her 

 feet close together, pitched upon the neck of the dog, and broke it 

 short in two. 



Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of 

 rabbits, which possessed all the hillocks and dry places : but these 

 being inconvenient to the huntsmen, on account of their burrows, 

 when they came to take away the deer, they permitted the country- 

 people to destroy them all. 



Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregularities 

 are removed, are of considerable service to the neighbourhoods that 

 verge upon them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their 

 firing ; with fuel for the burning their lime ; and with ashes for 

 their grasses ; and by maintaining their geese and their stock of 

 young cattle at little or no expense. 



The manor-farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted 

 claim, I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), 

 of turning all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons, " bidentibus 

 exceptis."* The reason, I presume, why sheepf are excluded, is, 

 because, being such close grazers, they would pick out all the finest 

 grasses, and hinder the deer from thriving. 



Though (by statute 4 and 5 W. and Mary, c. 23) "to burn on any 

 waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath 

 and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and confine- 

 ment in the house of correction ; " yet, in this forest, about March 

 or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath- 

 was generally more than adequate to the loss sustained, the peasantry were satisfied, and 

 found in the arrangement no cause of complaint ; when suddenly, in 1848, although the 

 preceding years the indemnity received by them had been nearly doubled, they discovered 

 that such a state of things could exist no longer ; and thus, supreme authority ceding to 

 popular will, a general extermination of the game took place throughout the land." 



* For this privilege the owners of that estate used to pay to the king annually seven 

 bushels of oats. 



fin the Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, no sheep are 

 admitted to this day. 



