However this may have been with the game, it is certain that the most important privileges were those of masting swine, and cutting timber or brushwood in the forests[156]. Grants to this effect are common, and it is plain that a considerable quantity of woods were in the hands of corporations, and even of private individuals, as well as of the Crown. How they came into private hands is not clear; some perhaps by bargain and sale, some by inheritance, some by grant, some no doubt by usurpation. The most powerful markman may at last have contrived to appropriate to himself the ownership of what woodland remained, though he was still compelled to permit the hereditary axe to ring in the forest[157]; and all experience shows that both here and in Germany monasteries were often founded in the bosom of woods, granted for religious purposes, out of what perhaps had once endowed an earlier religion, and which supplied at once building materials, fuel and support for cattle[158]. But even in these, it seems that the king, the duke and the geréfa interfered, claiming a right to pasture certain numbers of their own swine or cattle in them, and to give this privilege to others. ----- Footnote 156: The importance of pannage or masting was such as to cause the introduction of a clause guarding it, in the Charta de Foresta,—a document considered by our forefathers as hardly less important than Magna Charta itself: see § 9. Domesday usually notes the amount of pannage in an estate, and Fleta (Bk. ii. cap. 80) thinks it necessary to devote a chapter to the subject. Footnote 157: The Oldsaxons in Westphalia called a distinguished class of persons Erfexe, or Hereditary axes, from their right to hew wood in the Mark. Möser (Osnab. i. 19) gives an erroneous derivation for this name, but Grimm corrects him: Deut. Rechtsalt. 504. Footnote 158: “Dunhelmum veniens, locum quidem natura munitum, sed non facile habitabilem invenit, quoniam densissima eum silva totum occupabat,” etc. Transl. Sci. Cuðb. Bed. Hist. vol. ii. p. 302. The earliest grants of land on which these establishments were placed, usually state the land to be _silva_ or _silvatica_. -----