IBature IRotes : 
Zbc Selbovne Society’s flDaoasine. 
No. 52. APRIL, 1894. VoL. V. 
ENGLISH COMMONS AND FORESTS.- 
HE turbid flood which obliterates landmarks and sweeps 
buildings, trees, cattle, hay-ricks and corn-ricks before it, 
is the outcome of a thousand swollen streamlets, each, 
it may be, of scarce a foot’s span. In like manner 
the historians of the great revolutions that have taken place 
in the history of mankind are all agreed in ascribing the event 
they severally chronicle, not to one cause, but to many. So the 
great revolution wrought by the quiet and persistent endeavours 
of the Commons Preservation Society, aided and often instigated 
by “ village Hampdens ” and right-minded landlords, took its 
origin from that point of time when the encroachments of those 
“ petty tyrants,” the lords of the manor, endured for centuries, 
had become too grievous to be borne. 
What Carlyle has done for the service of constitutions by his 
History of the French Revolution, Mr. Shaw-Lefevre has most ably 
accomplished in the cause of our commons and forests, and the 
rights of the public attaching thereto, by his description, at once 
elaborate and vivid, of a thirty years’ struggle and its ante- 
cedents. Not an easy struggle, because the rank and file of the 
legal profession was then — whatever they may be now — con- 
vinced, as Professor Freeman says, that, “as there has been an 
hereditary king from all eternity, so there has been an hereditary 
lord of the manor from a time only so far short of eternity, as to 
give the king time to make him a grant. ”f 
The author has drawn aside the dark veil which till lately 
* English Comnions and Forests : the Story of the Battle during the last Thirty 
Years for Public Rights over the Commons and Forests of England and Wales. 
By the Right. Hon. G. .Shaw-Lefevre, M.P. (London : Cassell & Co., los. 6d.) 
t History of the Norman Conquest, v., 460-461. 
