106 THE ROYAL FORESTS OF ENGLAND 



square miles, was disafforested, on the petition of the inhabi- 

 tants, about the beginning of the sixteenth century. A decree 

 of the duchy for the year 1550, whereby the rights of a parish 

 church were conferred upon the chapel of Rossendale, refers 

 to the bill of supplication for the disafforesting as having been 

 performed forty-four years previously, when the Crown came 

 to the conclusion that the land would be used for good purpose 

 if the deer were removed. The deer were accordingly killed, 

 and the land let out to the inhabitants. The decree of 1550 

 states that whereas before the disafforesting there were only 

 about twenty persons resident in the forest, the population then 

 numbered about one thousand of all ages. 



Although there was considerable disafforesting in the county 

 as early as the end of Henry VII. 's reign in Blackburnshire, 

 the Crown deer were preserved with some strictness in other 

 parts of the county palatine long after the Restoration. 

 William III., in 1697, issued his warrant, countersigned by 

 the Earl of Stamford, as chancellor of the duchy, to the 

 master foresters, bow-bearers, or keepers of the forests, chases, 

 and parks of Lancashire, complaining of great destruction of 

 deer, and ordering that precise accounts were to be returned 

 yearly of the number of deer killed, and on what authority, as 

 well as of the stock remaining, etc. 



