ANCIENT AND MODERN FORESTRY 17 



New Forest. It was not entirely new afforesta- 

 tion over a large portion of a county where 

 no royal forests had previously existed. These 

 conditions being borne in mind, one must doubt 

 the evidence of Walter Mapes, chaplain to 

 Henry II., when he wrote that the 'Conqueror 

 took away much land from God and men, and 

 converted it to the use of wild beasts, and the 

 sport of his dogs ; for which he demolished 

 thirty-six churches, and exterminated the inhabi- 

 tants/ He merely reproduced in the vulgar 

 tongue what Henry of Huntingdon had written 

 shortly before in Latin ; then, by the time that 

 Joannes Brompton wrote his Chronicles in the 

 reign of Edward III., the monkish version had 

 become an article of firm belief. It is not 

 difficult to picture the state of affairs which 

 then existed. Resolved to seize and to hold all 

 rights of the Chase as a royal monopoly and 

 prerogative, William I. still felt reluctant to 

 drive the recently-conquered Saxon race to the 

 extremest verge of anger and to the hatred 

 born of despair ; so he caused the supposititious 

 Forest Laws of Canute to be forged, and merely 

 seemed to enforce them somewhat more strictly 



