A History of Police in England

by W. L. Melville Lee

Nor anything that doth belong thereunto:

The offences of others you shall not conceal,

But to the utmost of your power you shall them reveal,

Unto the officers of the Forest,

Or to them who may see them redrest:

All these things you shall see done,

So help you GOD at his Holy Doom."[73]

Such then in brief were the salient features of the police arrangements by which the prerogative of hunting was secured to the Sovereign, arrangements which, it will be seen, were closely allied to the general scheme of peace maintenance then in vogue throughout the realm. A fuller description of Forest Law, together with an interesting map of the Forest lands, may be found in Mr Inderwick's "The King's Peace": the present enquiry, however, must not extend beyond this slight survey of the machinery by which the laws in question were enforced, and may conclude with a glance at the influence that such legislation exerted over the country at large. The severity of the law coupled with the inadequacy of the executive government produced their natural result. The people resented the harsh treatment they were subjected to, and broke the unpopular regulations or evaded the irksome restrictions whenever they could, which was not seldom. Many who under a wiser régime would have remained good citizens became outlaws merely out of a spirit of opposition, and in consequence, these huge tracts of forest, whose recesses were hardly ever visited even by the forest officers, and whose boundaries were hardly known to anyone else, became the stronghold of the lawless and disaffected, as well as the refuge of the unfortunate.[74]

In the opinion of many, our existing game laws, are harsh and tyrannical: it is often said that all men have an inalienable right to chase or snare any animal that is not domesticated, because, in the nature of things, a wild beast cannot have an owner. All this may be perfectly true, but if such a common right existed, it has not been enjoyed for a very long time, not since the days, perhaps, when our forefathers performed their Druidical rites at the monoliths of Stonehenge, apparelled only in woad and mistletoe. It is unprofitable to argue about the rights of prehistoric man: what was best for him is not always applicable to a twentieth century community, and we may be thankful that whilst a few beasts of warren and chase still remain to us, we are no longer oppressed, as men used to be, by a relentless "lex foresta" for their protection.

To return, however, from the digression into which the consideration of forest law has led, to the more general theme of the police system of the Statute of Winchester, it is to be observed that the terms "Watch" and "Ward," though commonly used in conjunction to express a single idea, are not really synonymous. Blackstone says that the ward was set by day, and the watch by night, and that the one begins only when the other ends. Without making too much of the distinction between the two, we must remember that the population was almost entirely an agricultural one, and was occupied throughout the day in the fields; consequently every man could protect his own property and, if necessary, raise the hue and cry against any who came to despoil him. Household belongings were few, and apparently of such little account that not only were they always left unprotected in the daytime, but it was even thought unnecessary to employ a nightly police except during the summer and autumn months, when the crops were ripening in the fields, the Statute only requiring the watch to be set "from the day of the Ascension until the day of St Michael."