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 
B 
