Another grievous innovation, introduced at the same period, consisted in the depopulation of whole countries for the purposes of the king’s royal diversion; and subjecting both them and all the ancient forests of the kingdom to the unreasonable severities of forest laws imported from the continent, whereby the slaughter of a beast was made almost as penal as the death of a man. In the Saxon times, though no man was allowed to kill or chase the king’s deer, yet he might start any game, pursue, or kill it, upon his own estate. But the rigour of these new constitutions vested the sole property of all the game in England in the king alone; and no man was entitled to disturb any fowl of the air, or beast of the field, of such kinds as were specially reserved for the royal amusement of the sovereign, without express licence from the king, by a grant of a chase, or free warren: and those franchises were granted as much with a view to preserve the breed of animals as to indulge the subject. From a similar principle to which, though the forest laws are now mitigated, and by degrees grown entirely obsolete, yet from this root has sprung a bastard slip, known by the name of the _game law_, now arrived to and wantoning in its highest vigour: both founded upon the same unreasonable notions of permanent property in wild creatures; and both productive of the same tyranny to the commons; but with this difference, that the forest laws established only one mighty hunter throughout the land, the game laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor. {335} Another innovation produced by the conquest was, “narrowing the remedial influence of the country-courts, the great seats of Saxon justice, and extending the original jurisdiction of the king’s justiciaries to all kinds of causes arising in all parts of the kingdom. To this end the _Aula-regis_, with all its multifarious authority, was erected; and a capital justiciary appointed, with powers so large and boundless, that he became at length a tyrant to the people, and formidable to the crown itself. The constitution of this court, and the judges themselves who presided there, were fetched from Normandy: and the consequence naturally was, the ordaining that all proceedings in the king’s courts should be carried on _in the Norman_ [_or French_] _instead of the English language_:—a provision the more necessary, because none of his Norman justiciaries understood English; but as evident a badge of slavery as ever was imposed upon a conquered people.” And yet the nation was obliged to submit to it and bear it, for ages. The former plainness and simplicity now gave way to the abstruseness, chicanery, and subtilty, which have ever since so unhappily characterized our legal proceedings. {338a}