Agricultural Capabilities of the New Forest. 231 
" Dear Sir, " January 23i<l, 1871. 
" You ask me to send you a sketch of the present state of the New 
Forest, from a legal point of view. Althoncrh I have not the right to speak with 
authority as a lawyer, 1 have ])aid some little attention to this suhjeet during 
my residence in the Forest, and am happy to give you my ideas for wliat they 
are worth. I shall not go into any detail as to the acreage or geoi^rajjhical 
position of the Forest, because as 1 understand that you are engaged on a 
paper that treats of its agricultural capabilities, you will yourself have entered 
upon these points ; but 1 will endeavour to give you a simple outline of the 
somewhat peculiar situation it occupies when the legal ownership of the soil 
and the beneficial enjoyment of its produce are considered. The New Forest, 
alone of English forests, has a record of its first formation made contempo- 
raneously with its afforestation. Shortly before the date of Domesday Book 
the area of the Forest was subject only to the ordinary land laws of the king- 
dom. If not the whole, the greater part of the land within its limits 
was probably uncultivated, very extensively wooded, and in the hands of the 
Sovereign as part of that roj'al demesne from which, in theory, all the private 
property in the realm originally had been carved out. Around and within its 
boundaries lay various manors, the results of grants from the Crown, as well as 
demesne lauds of the Sovereign, which have since passed into the hands of 
subjects ; and without doubt the same method of cultivation and the same 
privileges of the tenants of the Crown, or of the Lords of JManors, were here in 
force as were usual elsewhere. Those who held the cultivated soil, whether 
ploughlands or meadow, used it in connection with the right of pasturing their 
cattle on the uncultivated waste, a right then probably necessary to the rude 
farming of the period, and with which neither the Crown nor a Lord of the 
Manor, as the proprietor of the soil itself, had any power to interfere, further 
than to prevent the illegal encroachments of strangers, or the assumption of 
unlimited pasturage by their tenants. A power, however, existed in the 
Sovereign, traceable back to very remote times, possessed by no subject, and 
which, when exercised, was capable of working very great hardship, and of 
effecting a great change in the holding of all lands over which it extended. 
This was the prerogative of afforestation ; and it is the peculiar nature of this 
excrescence, as it were, of the land laws, which renders at this veiy day the 
management and the disposal of the New Forest so dilBcult to arrange, so as 
at once to promote the advantage of the public, and at the same time zealously 
to respect the interests of private persons. This power of aflbrestation was put 
in force by William the Conqueror upon an area of land which, in its limits, 
may be taken to be identical with the New Forest as it exists at present. The 
great bulk of the acreage was probably the King's own demesne, but a portion 
of it certainly was in the possession of subjects. From that moment the com- 
mon law was overridden by forest law, the preservation of deer and provision 
for their food became of an importance far superior to the production of meal 
and corn, and the prosperity of men ; consequently these laws are almost univer- 
sally opposed to the cultivation of the soil and the increase of the people. It is 
impossible in a short space to enter minutely into these laws. Suffice it to 
say, that men within a forest might be forbidden to build houses, to cut their 
timber, to plough their lands, to grub their coppices, or to pasture the open 
lands with freedom, either as to time or as to the animals they chose to keep. 
With the laws for the punishment of crimes committed directly against the 
deer we are not now concerned, but it is necessary for our purpose to allude to 
such constitutional infringements of public liberty as 1 have mentioned above, 
not so much because I would point to instances of legal wrong founded ujDon 
such laws in old times, but because in these very days, long alter such obnox- 
ious powers had ceased to be exercised by any Sovereign, a Government 
Department has raked them from the dust, aud threatened to enforce them for 
