Hunting was not merely the chief amusement of our early kings: it was a necessary pursuit for the keeping down of the wild beasts then a real danger to the fields and their cultivators. The Forest Charter of Canute the Dane (dated 1016) is a myth; but it is certain that, before the Conquest, the sovereign had a peculiar--howbeit, an undefined--property in the woodland. The Conqueror, who, according to the Saxon Chronicle, loved the tall deer as if he had been their father, devastated far and wide to make the New Forest; and he and his immediate successors punished hurt done to the deer with loss of life or limb. The Great Charter contained provisions against this odious abuse of power, and under Henry III. a special charter of the forest enacted that no man should lose life or limb for killing deer, at the same time that it disafforested (_i.e._, removed from the forest to which they had been improperly joined) vast tracts of country. After the New there was but one other forest made in England, that was the land round Hampton Court, afforested under Henry VIII. by Act of Parliament. An attempt to revive royal rights over the woodland hastened the fall of Charles the First, and then the Commonwealth gave the forest system its death-blow, though it was not till the time of George III. that the great mass of enactments was formally repealed. A Court of Swainmote lingers in the New Forest and elsewhere, and its officials, called Verderers, albeit shorn of their ancient power and splendour, do their quaint antics still; but by an odd, though happily not singular inversion, those old popular wrongs are now become popular privileges; Epping Forest, for instance, could never have become a public park but for the Crown rights, and these same rights over the woodlands throughout the country now yield an income which more than covers the cost of the whole Civil List. Had the Crown looked more sharply to its own, the profit to ourselves had been still vaster. The forest laws, however complex in detail, were all inspired by one consistent idea--the preservation, to wit, of the king's venison. Even under Edward I.'s comparatively humane rule the verderer held an inquest upon a deer found dead in the Regard, just as the coroner did upon a man's body, and the jury found how the creature came to its end. The very arrows gleaned there were entered in the verderer's role. The freeholder within that charmed ground might not fell his own timber without leave, lest he should spoil the _Cover_: nor could he turn out his goats to browse, for they would taint the pasture; whilst he must feed his sheep in moderation, else he committed the grievous offence of _surcharging_ the forest.