man's land if he has first shot at it from the road. 25 The same provision is found in the Scottish laws.

The king has his special rights of hunting everywhere: "It is free for the king to hunt everywhere in his country. In whatsoever place a hart, which is hunted by the king's huntsmen, shall be taken, no one is to have the quarter pertaining to the land.”

The concluding sections of the A.L. W., Anom., 26 proclaim the freedom of hunting: "three immunities of an innate Cymro five free erws; co-tillage of waste; and hunting.” "Three things free to a kindred and its aillts under the privilege of maternity: building timber out of wild woods; hunting over wild ground; and mast gathering in wild land." It was the duty of the chief to see that these privileges were not abused.

The Western Highlands and the Orkney and Shetland Isles give us very little information as to the regulations about wild animals on the waste. In the first place, the

township," which contained the cultivated land, lay almost always convenient to fishery along the sea-coast or along the river banks in the lower parts of the glens, fenced off from the waste, so that there was little chance of interference by the wild beasts with the arable crops; the great mountains in the backgrounds had been from time immemorial open to the deer; the great grain-growing monasteries were absent; and no federal government was acknowledged which could have made forest laws for the community. Until the devastation of the Western Highlands by the descendants of the chiefs or their commercial assignees, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, each district made and administered its own customary bye-laws or neighbourhood laws by its elected birlaw men or local arbitrators.

In the Irish laws, apart from the very elaborate and clearly laid down rules about fencing, which apply as much or more to tame cattle as to wild beasts, birds, and fishes, all that specially relates to wild animals tends to show that where all owned the waste in common, all could hunt and take the beasts that feed on it, but that all were responsible for damage to the common arable crop. The owners of

fenced private woods were liable for the damage by wild animals which sheltered there; 27 among the "inherent rights of every territory" was the right to the wild animals in the wood, even if appropriated. The form of the regulations against misuse was a matter for the locality where all owned the waste.

The rivers all over the Islands, before they were polluted by refuse, abounded in salmon. The Norman or Angevin kings put them "in defence "-that is, preserved them for their own use as a commercial asset. In the rest of the Islands they were free to the community.

The Border laws, made in the sixteenth century from time to time with a view to keep the peace on the debatable land between England and Scotland, are an example on a larger scale 28 of the difficulties which attended the regulations of hunting and fishing on waste land between two tribes or communities. There was a most elaborate order for watches on all the fords of the streams and heads of the glens to prevent either side interfering with the other's fishing of the Tweed, and to check cattle raiders. The laws provide against hunting or depasturing cattle upon the other side of a debatable line; by those of Queen Mary, 1553, the inhabitants were to depasture their cattle within the limits and bounds of their own realm, which, as they had no map, they could only know from traditional perambulations, or risk their cattle being impounded, which would mean a bloody feud.

Coming back to those parts in which the federal government existed, and was strong enough to enforce a forest law for its benefit, to England and South-Eastern Scotland, corn-growing lands influenced by the theory of the Roman dominium, where the ownership of land was in the king, we meet with forest laws administered by and for the benefit of the king. It lay with him to make the regulations for the use of the waste; it was a district unfenced, unmeasured, and varying in extent as it was affected by the increase of cultivated lands; it became increasingly valuable to the king for revenue and as providing him with the sinews of war for the State; it is not surprising that he and his

officials perpetually encroached on the unfenced lands which were not part of the waste at the expense of private persons or of monasteries.

If one is to take seriously John's statement in a letter to Brian de Lisle, 29 he at least understood his position, even if the monastic authors and their followers did not. He puts vert before venison.

The forest laws attributed to William the Lion provided that anyone taking a wild beast without licence was to be arrested and held to the king's order (i.e., an indefinite fine), and for hunting without licence a fine of £10. A free tenant whose lands ran with the forest, and whose hounds followed a beast from his lands into the forest, might follow and kill as far as he may cast his horne or his dogleisch."

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In England, in the first instance, any freeman had a right to hunt wild animals, whether game or vermin, on all unenclosed waste, unless such land had been granted by the king to private persons, or was subject to the forest laws. The grants of chases, parks, and warrens to private persons who enclosed them was a real grievance, as it steadily grew, to the people in general; the clergy were great offenders in this respect, e.g. of Abbot Samson of Bury, Jocelyn says (p. 43), "He also enclosed many parks, which he replenished with beasts of the chase, keeping a huntsman with dogs."

Where the forest was unenclosed the chief difficulty was in the poachers, who would wait about on the boundaries of known forest land with a view to driving, frightening, or coaxing the wild animal out on to land not subject to the forest, and killing it, heading it off if it turned back into the forest. Then, if he missed, the beast might stray on to arable crops and become a nuisance. Such a condition very early led to a modification of forest laws on the debatable ground outside but on the edge of the forests, called the purlieus; here the king's officials had jurisdiction to enable them to control poachers.

The purlieu man must start the chase on his own land, hunt towards the forest, and not head the beast from the forest, called forestalling, so as to drive it on to cultivated land. He must call off his dogs before they entered the

forest, and not hunt in the night or with other than his own servants.

The purlieu must have been a great encouragement to poachers, justifying enclosure. It was a constant grievance of the cultivators of arable land who wanted to kill and eat the venison, but looked to have their crops protected from others who had the same desire.

I defer, until I have mentioned other uses of the forest, dealing with the grievances which arose in England, and the management of the forests there.

The following cases relating only to game will give some idea of the procedure in England in prosecution by the Crown for hunting in the forest. A forester traces blood in the snow to a house where he finds venison. The occupant is put in prison and dies there, but before dying accuses two others. The foresters search these men's houses, find bones there, and imprison them. One of them, Roger, later comes before the justices and establishes his innocence, on which it is decided that because Roger lay for a long time in prison, so that he is nearly dead, it is adjudged that he go quit ; and let him dwell outside the forest.30 A man would rather pay a heavy bribe to the forester than risk such an imprisonment.

The head of a hart is found in the wood of Henry Dauney at Maidford by the king's forester. Henry Dauney's forester is dead, and nothing is known of the hart. The whole town of Maidford, with the wood belonging to it, is seized into the king's hand on this account. Later, Henry Dauney gives two marks to get his wood back.

A chaplain and seven clerks are found with bows and arrows on the king's road within the forest. Hugh, the steward of the forest, retained them in prison. Afterwards he delivered them to the sheriff of Hunts, who imprisoned them at Cambridge. There they were handed over by the justices in Eyre to the Bishop of Lincoln. Simon the sheriff is in mercy for not sending word to the justices of the evil deeds of the clerks, and the verderers for not producing the bows and arrows. If the Church got the clerks' fines, the king got even by mulcting the sheriff and his own officials.

Wild Species of Tame Animals-Close Time.-One chief distinction between sheep and other tame animals on the waste was that thy were the only species of tame animals in use of which a wild kind was not also running on the range. The Forest Laws of William the Lion (ch. 8), treating of horses found in the forest, gives the forester the right to take them (if he can catch them). But it inflicts a fine of 4d. for tame or ridden horses.31 Gilbert de Umfravill gives the tenth colt of his brood mares running in his forest from the western part of Cotteneshopp. 32 The Charters of the monks of Newminster provide for catching the equi silvestres. They were in the fens of Cambridgeshire. Alas! your hors goth to the fen with wylde mares, as fast as he may go. In Sir G. S. Mackenzie's account of the cultivation of land by small farmers in Cromarty and Ross in 1810 (p. 250), he says of the harrowing after the plough, "The seed ... was covered . . . by harrows fastened by birch twigs to the tails of wild young horses, which were thus first accustomed to labour."

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Wild horses 34 and herds of wild cattle ranged and bred all over the Islands. FitzStephen, writing in 1174, tells of the herds of wild cattle running in the forests north of London (disafforested 2 Hen. III.).

Those who wish to see wild horses might do worse than go to Bampton Fair in Devon; the remains of herds of wild cattle are or were likely to be seen in England in the park at Chillingham in Northumberland, in Chartley Park, Staffordshire (enclosed in 1248),* and in Somerford Park, Cheshire.

Wild Swine.-Provision in defence of crops sown for food has to be made against the trespass not only of deer, but of that much more difficult class of animals to deter by fence, the "wild hog out of the woods."Pig-sticking was a favourite sport of kings in mediæval Britain, as in modern India.35

There was a close time for all wild animals. The season for hunting the wild swine by the king's huntsman is given in the Welsh laws 36 as from the ninth day of the calends

* I have since been informed that the last of this herd were sold by the late Lord Ferrers: the Duke of Bedford bought some animals for his menagerie.