THE NEW FOREST. 231 
which fell upon William’s family in connection with 
the Forest—the violent deaths of two of his sons and 
of a grandson when hunting there—may have acted 
as a motive to the monkish historians to find an 
adequate explanation for such calamities, which must 
have appeared to them to be of divine origin, as a retri- 
bution for some great crime connected with the Forest.* 
That William, having constituted the Forest in this 
region, administered and enforced the Game Jaws in 
it with rigour and cruelty, cannot be doubted. The 
Chronicler of 1087 said of him, ‘‘ He set mickle deer-frith 
and laid laws therewith, that he who slew hart or hind, 
that man should blind him. He forbade the harts, and 
so eke the boars; so sooth he loved the high deer, as 
though he were their father. Eke he set by the hares 
that they should fare free. His rich men moaned at 
it and the poor men bewailed it; but he was so stiff 
that he recked not of their hatred; but they must all 
follow the King’s will, if they would live or have their 
land or their goods or well his peace.” 
The Forest thus created was extended by his 
immediate successors, and at one time it was thirty 
miles in length, embracing all the land between the 
Avon and Southampton Water. But these extensions 
were given up by Henry III. and Edward L., in defer- 
ence to popular agitation, and from that time till the 
disafforesting took place in modern times the Forest 
* The subject of the alleged devastation of villages by the Con- 
queror in order to form the Forest is fully discussed in Lewis’s 
“ History of the New Forest,” and in the “ History of Hampshire ” 
by Woodward and Lockhart. 
