280 
ROYAL FORESTS. 
Royal Forests and Game Laws. 
The French authors I have quoted, as well as many other 
writers of the same nation, refer to the French Revolution as 
having given a new impulse to destructive causes which were 
already threatening the total extermination of the woods.* 
The general crusade against the forests, which accompanied 
that important event, is to be ascribed, in a considerable de¬ 
gree, to political resentments. The forest codes of the me¬ 
diaeval kings, and the local “coutumes” of feudalism contained 
many severe and even inhuman provisions, adopted rather for 
the preservation of game than from any enlightened views of 
the more important functions of the woods. Ordericus Vitalis 
informs us that William the Conqueror destroyed sixty par¬ 
ishes, and drove out their inhabitants, in order that he might 
turn their lands into a forest,f to be reserved as a hunting 
ground for himself and his posterity, and he punished with 
death the killing of a deer, wild boar, or even a hare. His 
successor, William Rufus, according to the Histoire des Rues 
de Normandie et des Rois L Angleterre, p. 67, “ was hunting 
one day in a new forest, which he had caused to be made out 
of eighteen parishes that he had destroyed, when, by mis- 
* Religious intolerance had produced similar effects in France at an 
earlier period. “ The revocation of the edict of Nantes and the dragon- 
nades occasioned the sale of the forests of the unhappy Protestants, who 
fled to seek in foreign lands the liberty of conscience which was refused 
to them in France. The forests were soon felled by the purchasers, and 
the soil in part brought under cultivation.”— Becquekel, Des Glimats , etc., 
p. 303. 
t The American reader must be reminded that, in the language of the 
chase and of the English law, a “ forest” is not necessarily a wood. Any 
large extent of ground, withdrawn from cultivation, reserved for the 
pleasures of the chase, and allowed to clothe itself with a spontaneous 
growth, serving as what is technically called “ cover ” for wild animals, 
is, in the dialects I have mentioned, a forest. When, therefore, the 
Norman kings afforested the grounds referred to in the text, it is not 
to be supposed that they planted them with trees, though the protection 
afforded to them by the game laws would, if cattle had been kept out, 
soon have converted them into real woods. 
