THE FOREST COURTS 13 



There was not a single forest wherein several monasteries 

 had not particular privileges conferred in early days, and in 

 some they were very numerous. Over the great stretch of 

 Peak Forest, Derbyshire, the abbeys of Basingwerk, Beau- 

 chief, Darley, Dernhall, Dieulacres, Leicester, Lilleshall, 

 Merivale, Roche, and Welbeck, together with the priories of 

 Kingsmead, Launde, and Lenton, all had rights. Such rights 

 referred for the most part to the felling of timber necessary for 

 their churches and buildings, or their farmsteads and fences, 

 as well as to the collecting of undergrowth or dead wood for 

 fuel. The agistment of cattle at certain seasons and the 

 pannage of swine were granted from time to time ; whilst 

 venison rights, more particularly in the shape of a tythe of 

 the deer killed, pertained to some few religious houses. The 

 tythe of the wild boars killed in Dean Forest went to the abbey 

 of St. Peter's, Gloucester, and the tythe of the deer hunted in 

 Pickering Lythe was the perquisite of the abbey of St. Mary's, 

 York. 



In addition to the forest pleas proper, certain special inquisi- 

 tions as to the condition of the forest and the charges against 

 trespassers were held by the local officials, but under the 

 particular justice of the forest or his deputy. Such inquisitions 

 were probably caused, in the first instance, by the infrequency 

 of the eyres. By a tiresome confusion, these courts of general 

 inquisition in latter days are sometimes termed swainmotes, 

 though they differed as much from the real swainmote as from 

 the forest pleas. 



The swainmote of later times, about which Manwood is 

 somewhat mistaken, as shown by Mr. Turner, was practically 

 the same as the attachment court. The two terms, "swainmote" 

 and "attachment" (and occasionally " woodmote "), are used 

 interchangeably in later days in various local proceedings of 

 the same forest, of which full records remain as, for instance, 

 in Sherwood, Windsor, Clarendon, and Duffield Frith. At one 

 and the same time in the fifteenth century, local courts of a like 

 character were being held in the forests of Windsor and 

 Northants under the style of swainmotes, in Lancashire and 

 Sherwood as attachment courts, and in Staffordshire and 

 Derbyshire as woodmotes. These courts of attachment, if 

 regularly kept, as ordered by the Forest Charter, met every 



