4 DEER AND DEER PARKS. Ch. I. 



have there.' ' Whitaker however, in his ' History of Craven/ "^ while treating 

 this subject with his usual good taste and judgment, leads us rather to 

 a contrary opinion, at least as regards the enclosure of any very con- 

 siderable tracts. 'From a passage,' he writes, 'in one of the earliest 

 charters relating to Bolton Priory, it appears that the Forest of Skipton 

 was enclosed with a pale ; the Chases of Blackburnshire were fenced in 

 the same manner. The Saxon forests, as far as I know, lay open, and 

 the practice of enclosing these immense tracts must have been introduced 

 by the great Norman lords. Musing on this circumstance, I was struck 

 by a passage of Columella from which it appears that the idea was familiar 

 to the ancient Princes of Gaul. " Hoc autem modo licet etiam latissimas 

 regiones tractusque montium claudere, sicuti Galliarum ; locorum vastitas 

 patitur." The subject is treated by that author in a very lively and elegant 

 manner ; the materials of the fence were cleft pales (vacerrae) of oak, cork 

 trees, &c., care was taken to enclose a supply of perennial water ; as also 

 great plenty of mast-bearing and bacciferous trees, particularly the arbutus; 

 the animals nourished in these enclosures were the stag, the wild boar, the 

 fallow-deer, the roe, and the oryx ; which last, from the account given of 

 his inverted mane by Pliny, can have been no other than the aurochs, or 

 wild bull still found in the Lithuanian forests. Beans, yet in use for the 

 winter fodder of deer, are particularly recommended ; on the whole, I pro- 

 pound it as a subject of curious speculation, whether the practice of enclos- 

 ing forests were not continued in France from the era of Classical Antiquity 

 to the Middle Ages, and whether the Norman lords, when they became 

 possessed of tracts equally wild and extensive in this country, did, by en- 

 closing them, anything more than follow the example of their ancestors. 

 The forests of the French nobility at the time of the late Revolution 

 were uniformly open, but so have been our own during four or five 

 centuries.' From the above passage it would appear that fallow-deer were 

 included, together with red-deer, roe-deer, wild swine and wild cattle,, 



" 8vo. London, 1865, p. 574. 1 2nd ed. p. 233. 



