V.: Chases, Parks, and Warrens.

Forests were necessarily royal monopolies and must on this and other grounds be distinguished from three things with which they are apt to be confused. (1) A “chase” was a district, once a royal forest, which had, without any formal act of disafforestation, been granted by the King to a private individual. The result was to transfer the monopoly of hunting to the grantee, while modifying the nature of the rights transferred. The full force of the forest laws was abated, although the extent and direction of this diminution was nowhere strictly defined, but varied from chase to chase. Such provisions of the forest law as continued to be binding were no longer enforced by royal officials and royal courts, but by those of the magnate, who obtained a franchise over the chase and the royal beasts it contained. (2) A “park” was any piece of ground enclosed with a paling, or hedge, whether with the object of protecting wild beasts or otherwise, and the right to effect this was quite independent of royal grant. If the owner of a manor in the near neighbourhood of a royal forest wished to keep deer of his own, which he might kill at pleasure, whether for sport or for food, without infringing the forest laws, he had to stock an enclosure with beasts legally his own, and to keep them under conditions which made confusion with the King’s deer impossible. In 1234 the barons asserted their right to keep private gaols for poachers taken in their parks (in parcis et vivariis suis), but the King refused to allow this. (3) A “warren,” which might belong either to the King or to any private owner, carried with it exclusive rights of hunting within its bounds all wild animals, except those technically defined as “beasts of the forest.” In practice it chiefly embraced hares and foxes. Neither parks nor warrens were protected by the forest law, but by that part of the common law which related to theft and trespass. This was, however, vigorously administered, passing gradually into the modern Game Laws. Dr. Stubbs held, apparently, too narrow a conception of warren, when he read it in its modern sense of “a rabbit warren.” It was a tract of land wherein exclusive rights of hunting lesser game (together with rabbits and other vermin) were preserved to its owner. The King might, and did, have his warrens and warreners, just as any subject might; and these royal warreners might inflict cruel injustice on the common people; but their power was less than that of foresters, as they were dependent on the common law. The forest code did not apply even to royal warrens.