CHAPTER IV 

 THE BEASTS OF THE FOREST 



MANWOOD'S Treatise on the Forest Laws, the first 

 edition of which appeared in 1598, has usually been 

 accepted, without demur, as giving indisputable details 

 about the forests of England. Mr. Turner has, however, 

 rightly pointed out in his recent volume, Select Pleas of the 

 Forest, that Manwood, writing at the end of the Elizabethan 

 period, when forest law had for the most part decayed, is 

 by no means altogether reliable, particularly in those parts 

 that treat of what constituted beasts of the forest and beasts 

 of the chase. In such particulars Manwood seems to have 

 relied on foreign rather than English treatises on hunting, 

 a fault in which he has been imitated by more than one modern 

 writer, and also to have confused methods of hunting with 

 forest legislation. 



Manwood declared that there were five beasts of the forest 

 the hart, the hind, the hare, the wild boar, and the wolf ; but 

 this in reality only makes four, for the hart and the hind are 

 the male and female of the red deer. He then made a second 

 division, termed the beasts of the chase, which included the 

 buck and the doe (the male and female of the fallow deer), 

 the fox, the martin, and the roe. The law, however, made no 

 distinction of this kind between the red and fallow deer ; both 

 of them were distinctly beasts of the forest, in any legal or 

 customary significance of that term. 



The truth as to the English beasts of the forest, or king's 

 game, all of which originally came under the head of venison, 

 can only be ascertained by a study of the eyre rolls and other 

 original forest proceedings. It then becomes clear that the 

 forest beasts numbered four the red deer, the fallow deer, 

 the roe, and the wild boar. 



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