With the decline of hawking and hunting, the Forest Laws fell into decay, and the Forests themselves were less regarded, and their boundaries less strictly observed. Under the Stuarts, we find the first traces of that system, which at last resulted in the almost entire devastation of the New Forest. James I. granted no less than twenty assart lands—_agri ex-sariti_—there having been previously only three;[50] and gave the privilege of windfalls to various persons;[51] whilst officers actually applied to him for trees in lieu of pay for their troops:[52] and Charles II. bestowed the young woods of Brockenhurst to the maids of honour of his court.[53] Manwood, who wrote towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, had, long before this, predicted what must happen, and the straits to which the English navy, as we know was the case, would be reduced. In Charles I.’s time the Forests were in a shameful condition. The keepers were in arrears of wages, and paid themselves out of the timber.[54] The consequences soon came. There was nothing left but wind-shaken and decayed trees in the New Forest, quite unfit for building ships.[55] Charles II., however, in 1669, probably influenced by Evelyn’s _Silva_, which appeared four years before, and had given a great impulse, throughout England, to planting, enclosed three hundred acres as a nursery for young oaks. But the waste and devastation still continued. At last, William III. legislated on the subject, for, to use the words of the Act, “the Forest was in danger of being destroyed;”[56] and power was given to plant six thousand acres. In 1703 came the great hurricane, which Evelyn so deplores, uprooting some four thousand of the best oaks. Nothing was done towards planting during the reigns of Anne and George I.;[57] and Phillipson’s and Pitt’s plantations in 1755 and 1756 are the next, but they have never thrived, owing to the land not having been drained, and the trees not having been thinned out at the proper time. In 1789 a Commission was appointed, and revealed a terrible state of things. William’s provisions had not only been set aside, but defied. Cattle were turned out, the furze and heath cut, and the marl dug by those who had no privileges. The Forest was, in fact, robbed under every pretext. The deer, from being overstocked, died in the winter by hundreds from starvation. On every side, too, encroachments were made by those whose business it was to prevent them. The rabbits destroyed the young timber, whilst the old was stolen.[58] In 1800 there was fresh legislation,[59] but it does not seem to have taken much effect; though, in 1808, a new system of planting upon a definite plan was introduced.