he _Saxon Chronicle_, "so much loved the high deer as
if he had been their father." The first of the Norman kings, and his
immediate successors, would not be very scrupulous about the
depopulation of a district if the presence of men interfered with their
pleasures. But Thierry thinks that the extreme severity of the Forest
Laws was chiefly enforced to prevent the assemblage of Saxons in those
vast wooded spaces which were now included in the royal demesnes.

All these extensive tracts were, more or less, retreats for the
dispossessed and the discontented. The Normans, under pretence of
preserving the stag and the hare, could tyrannize with a pretended
legality over the dwellers in these secluded places; and thus William
might have driven the Saxon people of Ytene to emigrate, and have
destroyed their cottages, as much from a possible fear of their
association as from his own love of "the high deer." Whatever was the
motive, there were devastation and misery. _Domesday_ shows that in the
district of the New Forest certain manors were afforested after the
Conquest; cultivated portions, in which the Sabbath bell was heard.
William of Jumieges, the Conqueror's own chaplain, says, speaking of the
deaths of Richard and Rufus: "There were many who held that the two sons
of William the King perished by the judgment of God in these woods,
since for the _extension_ of the forest he had destroyed many inhabited
_places (villas) and churches within its circuit_." It appears that in
the time of Edward the Confessor about seventeen thousand acres of this
district had been afforested; but that the cultivated parts remaining
had then an estimated value of three hundred and sixty-three pounds.
After the afforestation by the Conqueror, the cultivated parts yielded
only one hundred and twenty-nine pounds.

The grants of land to huntsmen (_venatores_) are common in Hampshire, as
in other parts of England; and it appears to have been the duty of an
especial officer to stall the deer--that is, to drive them with his
troop of followers from all parts to the centre of a circle, gradually
contracting, where they were to stand for the onslaught of the hunters.
In the survey many parks are enumerated. The word hay (_haia_), which is
still found in some of our counties, meant an enclosed part of a wood to
which the deer were driven.

In the seventeenth century this mode of hunting upon a large scale, by
stalling the deer--this mimic war--was co