By tlie Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson, F.S.A. 



39 



to the subject and at length became intolerable. But it should be 

 clearly understood what these Kings did. It used to be taught in 

 my early days of learning English history, that William I., in his 

 passionate fondness for the sport (for an old chronicle says of him 

 that ft he loved the tall stags as if he had been their father ") was 

 a monster of cruelty, who laid waste fair smiling fields in Hampshire 

 for thirty miles, expelled the people, seized their property and de- 

 molished thirty-six — some had said fifty, some even sixty-two parish 

 Churches ! We have lived to read a more correct account of the 

 matter. Voltaire first — after him William Cobbett and others — 

 scouted the story as gross exaggeration. It is well told in Mr. 

 Wise's History of the New Forest. That King William converted 

 much rich land into waste is hardly possible, because there never 

 was much to be converted. The soil is (geologically speaking) 

 chiefly Tertiary gravel, sand, and drift, rich only in heath and furze. 

 As to the vast number of Churches alleged to have been demolished, 

 they must have stood more thickly together, and the population 

 more dense than in any other part of England. Much of the mis- 

 take has arisen from wrong ideas as to what a forest really was. 

 What the King did — and very likely in an arbitrary way — was to 

 extend the law and rights of forest over a large tract of country that 

 had been free from them before : but the picture of unfeeling cruelty 

 as the story used to be told, is overdrawn. 



Henry II. moderated the forest law, and others promised redress, 

 but did not fulfil the promise. At last the Great Council of Barons 

 compelled King John to grant the celebrated Charter of the Forests. 

 A confirmation of that charter was obtained, but with very great 

 difficulty, from Henry III. It directed that all woods that had been 

 taken in, or, as it was called, afforested, to the prejudice of the 

 owners, should be disafforested, and no more additions were to be 

 made. A still further reduction was made in the reign of Edward I. 



King Edward I. ordered, in every county, certain knights to 

 make formal Perambulations of every forest, and to report what the 

 actual limits then were, compared with what they had been originally. 

 The map annexed shows how largely the Forest of Savernake had 

 been extended. I have never seen any map of it as it was at this 



