18 
NATURAL HISTORY OE SELBORNE. 
little while ago that, over their ale, they used to recount the exploits of 
their youth ; such as watching the pregnant hind to her lair, and, when 
the calf was dropped, paring its feet with a penknife to the quick to 
prevent its escape, till it was large and fat enough to be killed ; the 
shooting at one of their neighbours with a bullet in a turnip-field by 
moonshine, mistaking him for a deer ; and the losing a dog in the 
following extraordinary manner : — Some fellows, suspecting that a calf 
new-fallen was deposited in a certain spot of thick fern, went, with a 
lurcher, to surprise it ; when the parent-hind rushed out of the brake, 
and, taking a vast spring with all her feet close together, pitched upon 
the neck of the dog, and broke it short in two. 
' Another temptation to idleness and sporting was a number of rabbits, 
which possessed all the hillocks and dry places : but these being incon- 
venient to the huntsmen, on account of their burrows, when they came 
to take away the deer, they permitted the country-people to destroy 
them all. 
Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregularities are 
removed, are of considerable service to neighbourhoods that verge upon 
them, by furnishing them with peat and turf for their firing ; with fuel 
for the burning their lime ; and with ashes for their grasses ; and by 
maintaining their geese and their stock of young cattle at little or 
no expense. 
The manor-farm of the parish of Greatham has an admitted claim, 
I see (by an old record taken from the Tower of London), of turning 
all live stock on the forest, at proper seasons, ^^bidentibus exceptis."* 
contemplated a few years since ; and a Bill was lately proposed to be introduced into 
Parliament "to extinguish the right of the crown to stock the New Forest in 
Hampshire with deer and other wild beasts of the forest, and to empower her 
Majesty to enclose the several portions of the said Forest." This would have been 
regretted by White, for the wild and natural character of the county will be 
changed, and with that a corresponding variation will occur in its inhabitants. On 
the continent this is carried to a greater and more serious extent. In a book lately 
published, ' ' Chamois Hunting in Bavaria, " it is stated that by the increase of 
poaching, and the assumed right of the peasantry to consider the game as their 
own, brought on probably by the excessive preservation, and therefore temptation, 
it has been deemed necessary to extirpate it. In one chase of a circumference 
of about 60 English miles, a sporting count calculated that he would be able 
every year to kill 300 roebucks, 80 stags, and 100 chamois, but this was done 
at some cost. The count kept twenty-four game-keepers picked men, at the 
commencement of their preservation they shot seven poachers, and one of the 
keepers who had killed four was himself shot. Where the game was thus abundant 
and kept up at such a price! one of those political changes took place which gave 
the right of shooting to every individual of the community, and the count, some- 
what to diminish his pecuniary losses, ordered the game to be destroyed. This was 
done by proprietors and people, and in a very short period the extermination 
was almost completed. In another chapter the same author writes : " The noble 
proprietors of the forests bordering the Danube, in the neighbourhood of Donan 
Stauf, paid every year a considerable sum to the peasants, as indemnity for the 
damage done to their crops by the game ; and according as the price of corn 
rose these sums were increased. As the money received was generally more than 
adequate to the loss sustained, the peasantry were satisfied, and found in the 
arrangement no cause of complaint; when suddenly, in 1848, although the 
preceding years the indemnity received by them had been nearly doubled, they 
discovered that such a state of things could exist no longer ; and thus, supreme 
authority ceding to popular will, a general extermination of the game took place 
throughout the land." 
* For this privilege the owners of that estate used to pay to the king annually 
seven bushels of oats. 
