HEATH FIRES. 
17 
ner : — Some fellows, suspecting that a calf new-fallen was de 
posited 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 aU 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. Rabbit. 
Such forests and wastes, when their allurements to irregulari- 
ties 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 of 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 hve stock on the forest, at proper seasons, hidentihus 
exceptis* The reason, I presume, why sheepf are excluded is 
because, being such close grazers, they would pick out all the 
finest grasses and hinder the deer from thriving. 
Though (by statute 4 and 5 Wm. and Mary, c. 23) to burn on 
any waste, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, 
heath, and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and 
confinement in the house of correction yet, in this forest, about 
March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such 
vast heath-fires are lighted up that they often get to a masterless 
head, and, catching the hedges, have sometimes been communi- 
cated to the underwoods, woods, and coppices, where great 
damage has ensued. The plea for these burnings is, that, when 
the old coat of heath, &c., is consumed, yoiing will sprout up, 
and afford much tender browze for cattle; but, where there is 
large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the very 
ground; so that for hundreds of acres nothing is to be seen but 
smother and desolation, the whole circuit round looking like the 
* For this privilege the owner of that'estate used to pay to the king annually seven bushels of oats. 
t In the Holt, where a full stock of fallow-deer has been kept up till lately, uo sheep are 
admitted to this day. 
c 
