After all, the best evidence is not from such arguments, but in the simple fact that the New Forest remains still the New Forest. Had the land been in any way profitable, modern skill, and capital, and enterprise, would have certainly been attracted. But its charms lie not, and never did, in the richness of its soil, but in its deep woods and wild moors.[36] Our view of the matter, then, is that William, like all Normans, loving the chase—loving, too, the red deer, as the Old-English Chronicler, with a sneer, remarks, as if he was their own father—converted what was before a half-wooded tract, a great part of which he held in demesne, inherited by right of being king, into a Royal Forest, giving it the name of the New Forest, in contradistinction to its former title of Ytene. To have laid waste a highly-cultivated district for the purposes of the chase, as the Chroniclers wish us to believe, would have defeated his chief object, as there would have been no shelter then, nor for many years to come, for the deer: and is contradicted, as we have seen, both by _Domesday_, by the very nature of the soil, and the names of the places. The real truth is, that the stories, which fill our histories, of William devastating the country, burning the houses, murdering the people, have arisen from a totally wrong conception of an ancient forest. Until this confusion of an old forest with our modern ideas is removed, we can have no clear notions on the subject. We must remember that an ancient forest did not simply mean a space thickly covered with trees, but also wild open ground, with lawns and glades. Its derivation points out to what sort of places it was originally applied.[37] The word _hurst_, too, which, as we have seen, is so common a termination throughout the district, means a wood which produces fodder for cattle, answering to the Old High-German _spreidach_.[38] The old forests possessed, if not a large, some scattered population. For them a special code of laws was made, or rather gradually developed itself. Canute himself appointed various officers—Primarii, our Verderers; Lespegend, our Regarders; and Tinemen, our Keepers. The offences of hunting, wounding, or killing a deer, striking a verderer or regarder, cutting vert, are all minutely specified in his Forest Law, and punished, according to rank and other circumstances, with different degrees of severity.[39] The Court of Swanimote was, in a sense, counterpart to the Courts of Folkemote and Portemote in towns. A forest was, in fact, a kingdom within a kingdom, with certain, well-defined laws, suited to its requirements, and differing from the common law of the land. The inhabitants had regular occupations, enjoyed, too, rights of pasturing cattle, feeding swine, and cutting timber.[40] All this, as we have seen, went on as before, not so much, but still the same, in the New Forest. Manors, too, with the exception of being subject to Forest Law, remained in the heart of it unmolested.