We breakfast in the quaint old Court room. Before us is the railed-off dais, at the end, where the Verderer and his assistants sit to administer the law. On the wall behind them are the antlers of a dozen stags; reminders of the time, about the middle of the present century, when the herds of deer were destroyed on account of the continual poaching to which they gave occasion. Many of the cases that come before the Court now are of simple trespass.
This quaint old room, with its great oak beam overhead, and its kitchen grate wide enough to roast a deer—this strange blending of an hotel dining-room and a Court of Justice, has nevertheless a link with the far distant past more wonderful than anything that has come down to us in the ruins of Greece or Rome.
Look at the simple card that notifies the dates of holding the Vederer's Court. Here is an old one which the Verderer, Philip Baylis, has kindly sent to Senator Hoar in response to his request for a copy.
V. R.
Her Majesty's Forest of Dean,
Gloucestershire,
VERDERERS' COURT.
Verderers:
Charles Bathurst, Esq. Sir Thomas H.
Crawley-Boevey, Bart.
Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss, Esq.
Russell James Kerr, Esq.
Deputy-Surveyor:
Philip Baylis, Esq.
Steward:
James Wintle.
——NOTICE——
The VERDERERS of Her Majesty's Forest of Dean hereby give
Notice that the COURT of ATTACHMENT of our Sovereign Lady
the Queen for the said Forest will be holden by adjournment, at
the Speech House, in the said Forest, at half-past Two o'clock, in
the afternoon, on the following days during the year 1897, viz.:
Wednesday, the 27th January;
Monday, the 8th March;
Saturday, the 17th April;
Thursday, the 27th May;
Tuesday, the 6th July;
Monday, the 16th August;
Friday, the 24th September;
Wednesday, the 3rd November;
Monday, the 13th December;
James Wintle,
Steward.
Newnham, 1st January, 1897.
Many years ago I stood in the Court Room examining a similar notice, puzzled at the absence of any system or order in the times appointed for the sittings, which did not come once a month, or every six weeks; and did not even fall twice in succession on the same day of the week. Turning to the landlord of the hotel I asked, "What is the rule for holding the Court? When is it held?" "Every forty days at twelve o'clock at noon" was the reply. Reflection showed that so strange a periodicity related to no notation of time with which we are now in touch; it must belong to a system that has passed away; but what could this be?
We are reminded by the date of the building we are in (1680), that the room itself cannot have been used for much more than two centuries for holding the Courts.
But there was a Verderer's Court held in several Forests besides this Forest of Dean, long before the Stuart days. The office itself is mentioned in Canute's Forest charter, dating back nearly nine hundred years; and as at that period about a third of England was covered with Forests, their influence must have been very powerful; and local laws and customs in them must have been far too firmly established for such a man as Canute to alter them. He could only have confirmed what he found; much as he confirmed the laws of nature as they affected the tides at Southampton!
The next Forest Charter of national importance after Canute's, is that of Henry III., in 1225. It is clear that he, again, made no material change in the old order of things; and in recapitulating the old order of the Forest Courts, he ordains that the Court of Attachment (called in Dean Forest the Court of the Speech) was to be held every forty days. This Court was one of first instance, simply for the hearing of evidence and getting up the cases for the "Swainmote,"* which came three times a year. The Swains were free man; and at their mote evidence was required from three witnesses in each case, on which the Verderer and other officers of the king passed sentence in accordance with the laws laid down in this Charter. From this Swainmote there was a final appeal to the High Court of the Judges in Eyre (Eyre, from "errer" to wander, being the Norman French for Itinerant, or, on Circuit) which was held once in three years.
[Footnote] * That the Forest Charter of Hen. III. did not establish these courts is proved from a passage in Manwood, cap. 8, which runs thus: "And the said Swainmotes shal not be kept but within the counties in the which they have been used to be kept." [End of Footnote]
The forty-day court was common to all the ancient forests of Britain; and that they go back to before the time of Henry III. is clear from the following extracts from Coke's Fourth Institute, for which I am indebted to the kindness of James G. Wood, of Lincoln's Inn.