(7): Arbitrary government and illegal exactions.

If the laws of Henry’s code were stringent and the legal payments onerous, it was a worse evil that the law could be defied by Crown officials, and that payments of a perfectly illegal nature might be freely exacted. Within the forest bounds, the peasantry lived in daily fear of the discretionary authority of officials, whose most unreasonable wishes they dared not oppose. Sometimes a local tyrant established a veritable reign of terror. This happened in the forest of Riddlington under Peter de Neville, as the records of the Rutland Eyre, held in 1269, disclose. One item, taken almost at random from the long list of his evil deeds, will suffice: “The same Peter imprisoned Peter, the son of Constantine of Liddington, for two days and two nights at Allexton, and bound him with iron chains on suspicion of having taken a certain rabbit in Eastwood; and the same Peter the son of Constantine, gave two pence to the men of the aforesaid Peter of Neville, who had charge of him, to permit him to sit upon a certain bench in the gaol of the same Peter, which is full of water at the bottom.” Other examples are only too abundant. In 1225, Norman Samson, a petty official of the forest of Huntingdon, put men to the torture without cause, and only released them from their torments in return for heavy bribes. If such things could happen after the Charters of 1215 and 1217, it is not likely that foresters were more merciful before. John was always too indifferent or too busy to redress such wrongs. The only guarantee against their recurrence was that honest officials should be selected. Chapter 45 of Magna Carta, which tried to effect this, was withdrawn in 1216.

Some good must have resulted from chapter 16 of the Forest Charter, which forbade wardens to hold pleas of the forest. This prevented wardens from being judges in their own cause; but their arbitrary acts continued to be plentiful under Henry III., as has been already shown. Sixty years after Magna Carta, the men of Somerset complained that “foresters come with horses at harvest time and collect every kind of corn in sheaves within the bounds of the forest and outside near the forest, and then they make their ale from that collection, and those who do not come there to drink and do not give money at their will, are sorely punished at their pleas for dead wood, although the King has no demesne; nor does anyone dare to brew when the foresters brew, nor to sell ale so long as the foresters have any kind of ale to sell; and this every forester does year by year to the great grievance of the country.” Each one of these abuses had been forbidden by chapter 7 of the Carta de foresta, which had prohibited the making of “scotale” and the collection of corn, lambs, and pigs. Such rules were easier to enunciate than enforce.