The New Forest: its History and its Scenery.
enjoyed, too, rights of pasturing cattle, feeding swine, and cutting timber.[1] All this, as we have seen, went on as before, not so much, but still the same, in the New Forest. Manors, too, with the exception of being subject to Forest Law, remained
- ↑ In the Charta de Forestâ of Canute (Manwood, f. 3, sect. 27) mention is made in the forests of horses, cows, and wild goats which are all protected; and from sect. 28 it is plain that, under certain limitations, people might cut fuel. These, with other privileges, such as killing game on their own lands (see sect. xxx. f. 4)—for, by theory, all game was the King's—were compensations given to the forester for being subject to Forest Law.
Further, from the Charta de Forestâ of Henry III. (Manwood, ff. 6-11), we find that persons had houses and farms, and even woods, in the very centre of the King's forests; and the charter provides that they may there, on their own lands, build mills on the forest streams, sink wells, and dig marl-pits, referring, most probably, in the last case, to the New Forest, where marl has been used, from time immemorial, to manure the land; and, further, that in their own woods, even though in the forest, they might keep hawks, and go hawking. (See f. 7, sects. xii., xiii.)
It shows, too, that there was a population who gained their livelihood, as to this day, by huckstering, buying and selling small quantities of timber, making brushes, and dealing in bark and coal, which last article evidently points to the Forest of Dean. (F. 7, sect. xiv.)
We must not imagine that the Charta de Forestâ of Henry III. was entirely a series of new privileges. They were, with some notable exceptions, simply those rights which had been received from the earliest times in compensation for some of the hardships of the Forest Laws, and which had been wrested away, probably by Richard or John, but which had never been granted to those who dwelt outside the Forest. (On this point see especially "Ordinatio Foreste," 33rd Edward I., Statutes of the Realm, vol. i. p. 144. And again, "Ordinatio Foreste," 34th Edward I., sect. vi., same volume, p. 149, where the rights of pasturage are re-allowed to those who have lost it by the recent perambulation made in the twenty-ninth year of the King's reign.)
I think we may, therefore, gain from these clauses, especially when taken in conjunction with those of the Charta de Forestâ of Canute, a tolerably correct picture of an ancient forest—that it consisted not merely of
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