A Woodward, with ten Regarders under him, saw to the planting, cutting, and preservation of the timber, and also assigned wood and peat to those who enjoyed chimney rights. It is interesting to find these rights extended to the forests of northern France by Henry of Lancaster after those victories which caused him to arrogate to himself and his successors the title of "Rex Angliæ et Franciæ". Some of these wood rights were limited to the dead wood a man could reach with a crooked stick: hence the expression, "by hook or by crook". A Purveyor was also appointed on behalf of Portsmouth Dockyard to claim the timber needed for His Majesty's ships. Besides these officials, six Verderers were chosen by the freeholders and one by the king to sit in the Swainmote and uphold Forest rights. Now, since it has become the property of the Crown instead of the king--quite a different thing--the administration has been altered and the officials are much fewer: it has been placed under the Department of Woods and Forests, represented by a Deputy Surveyor, but the Verderers still meet six times a year at the King's House to maintain the rights of the commoners. And now the two main objects of the afforestation have nearly come to an end: neither venison nor vert are of their old importance. The deer had encroached so much on the foresters' rights, that their extinction was decreed; a few yet linger in the north and west, but the Forest is no longer for them. Moreover, since we have ceased to trust in the "wooden walls of Old England", the demand for sound oak timber is shrinking, and once in the utilitarian days of the last century it was seriously proposed to throw the whole district open for cultivation. Happily there were enough lovers of nature to save it, and it is still preserved as a bit of the wild country our forefathers enjoyed.