VI.: Forest Rights and Forest Grievances.

It is not difficult to understand the store which the Kings of England set upon their forests. They prized them not merely as a pleasure ground, but also as a source of revenue. Fines and amercements, individually small, but amounting to a large sum in the aggregate, flowed into the Exchequer. Great as were the pleasure and the profit to the King, the burden and loss inflicted upon the people were greater out of all proportion. Not only were the interests of forest–dwellers sacrificed to the royal hunting, not only were legal fines rendered trebly burdensome by the galling and wasteful manner of their collection; but the men who paid them were victims of illegal exactions in addition. These grievances may be considered under seven heads:—