Another formidable innovation was in the “royal forests.” The Norman kings were “mighty hunters,” and whole counties were stripped of their population, to give room for beasts of chase. They transplanted the forest laws of the Continent into England, and the penalties of their game laws were terrible. In the Saxon times, though no man was allowed “to kill the king’s deer,” yet every man was allowed to kill the game on his own estate. But the Norman law made the king the proprietor of _all game_, and no man could kill bird of the air, or beast of the field, without express royal license, by a grant of _free-warren_, which was more for the purpose of preserving the game than giving a right to the subject. With one exception, the Norman invasion was an unequivocal calamity. That exception was the right of primogeniture—a right essential to the establishment of a nobility, to the permanence of families in a condition of honour, and to the prevention of a gradual pauperism and degradation of society, as the lands became divided more and more. In all others, it was a sudden and mischievous extinction of all popular rights, and of all the principles of national progress. It made law arbitrary by curtailing the power of the county courts, and giving it to the king’s Norman justiciers, who thus became masters of every thing, and, by their Norman subtleties, altogether confused the national law. It introduced the feudal law, which was tyrannical in its essence. It almost excluded the national language from all public use, Norman-French alone being used in all the courts. It introduced the trial by combat, the origin of that custom which, under the name of duelling, authorises murder, provided the murdered man has previously had formal notice that his murder was intended; and also, that he had a chance of adding the murder of his adversary to his own. And to this Norman tyranny was due the whole long series of ruinous wars, which involved both England and France in infinite wretchedness, for little less than a hundred and fifty years.