GAME LAWS. 
281 
chance, he was killed by an arrow wherewith Tyrens de Rois 
[Sir Walter Tyrell] thought to slay a beast, but missed the 
beast, and slew the king, who was beyond it. And in this 
very same forest, his brother Richard ran so hard against a 
tree that he died of it. And men commonly said that these 
things were because they had so laid waste and taken the said 
parishes.” 
These barbarous acts, as Bonnemere observes,* were simply 
the transfer of the customs of the French kings, of their vassals, 
and even of inferior gentlemen, to conquered England. “ The 
death of a hare,” says our author, “ was a hanging matter, the 
murder of a plover a capital crime. Death was inflicted on 
those who spread nets for pigeons ; wretches who had drawn a 
bow upon a stag were to be tied to the animal alive; and 
among the seigniors it was a standing excuse for having killed 
game on forbidden ground, that they aimed at a serf.” The 
feudal lords enforced these codes with unrelenting rigor, and 
not unfrequently took the law into their own hands. In the 
time of Louis IX, according to William of Nangis, “ three 
noble children, born in Flanders, who were sojourning at the 
abbey of St. Nicholas in the Wood, to learn the speech of 
France, went out into the forest of the abbey, with their bows 
and iron-headed arrows, to disport them in shooting hares, 
chased the game, which they had started in the wood of the 
abbey, into the forest of Enguerrand, lord of Coucy, and were 
taken by the sergeants which kept the wood. When the fell 
and pitiless Sir Enguerrand knew this, he had the children 
straightway hanged without any manner of trial.” f The 
* Eistoire des Pay sans, ii, p. 190. The work of Bonnemkre is of great 
value to those who study the history of mediaeval Europe from a desire to 
know its real character, and not in the hope of finding apparent facts to 
sustain a false and dangerous theory. Bonnemere is one of the few writers 
who, like Michelet, have been honest enough and bold enough to speak 
the truth with regard to the relations between the church and the people 
in the Middle Ages. 
t It is painful to add that a similar outrage was perpetrated a very few 
years ago, in one of the European states, by a prince ol a family now de- 
