Mention of the deer and the venison suggests one particular in which the Norman Conquest probably did restrict the peasants' rights. There is evidence to show that the Normans were not the inventors of those game laws which forbade, under cruel penalties, any hunting in the woodlands. It is certain that this was no new thing of Norman invention, because there are the Forest Laws, as they are called, that is to say, laws for the preservation of the game and the timber, as early as the Saxon Heptarchy. There is also a code of very cruel game laws attributed to Canute. It has been suggested that this code was a forgery invented by the Norman kings to excuse the severity of their game laws. What seems perhaps most probable is that there were severe laws in existence before the Normans came, but that the Normans were the first to apply the laws very strictly. The statements about the numbers of villages and cultivated fields that William Rufus destroyed in order to make himself a hunting estate in the New Forest are almost certainly exaggerated misstatements. We must remember that all the earliest records that we have were written by monks or other clerics. Now the Church was often at variance with the lay authority and with the authority of the king. It was constantly trying to get more and more power into its own hands. Therefore all the stories are likely to have been written in a spirit antagonistic to the laity and in favour of the Church and all the Church's interests.
Just to show you the character of the game laws in those days and also to show how the law imposed different penalties on different classes, I will cite one or two sections from the code attributed to Canute.
"23. If any free or unfree man shall kill any beast of the Forest, he shall for the first pay double (i.e. double of ten shillings), for the second as much, and the third time shall forfeit as much as he is worth to the King.
"24. But if either of them by coursing or hunting shall force a royal beast (which the English call a staggon) to pant and be out of breath, the freeman shall lose his natural liberty for one year, the other his for two years; but if a bondman do the like, he shall be reckoned for an outlaw (what the English call a friendless man).
"25. But if any of them shall kill such a royal beast, the freeman shall lose his freedom, the other his liberty, and the bondman his life."
Human life and liberty were cheap, but the value of the King's deer was high.
I have said that England, by reason of the Norman Conquest, was caught up into the political affairs of the Continent. This was not merely because Normandy was a part of that Continent. It was chiefly because of the relationship or connection by marriage of the ruler of Normandy, who had now become the ruler of England also, with the ruler of another part of that country which we now call France—that is, of Anjou. In order to understand how this happened, we have to get these troublesome relationships into our mind.
A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD.
(A banquet is in progress upstairs.)
(From Wright's Homes of Other Days.)