What the Forest was when the Romans administered the land we know not;
but in Anglo-Saxon times it was doubtless a royal hunting ground,
_terra regis_ and _silva regis_, for spoiling which by fire as for
killing the game therein fines must be paid. These royal hunting
grounds, of which the great Forest in Hampshire was certainly not the
least, only became legal "forests" with the Conquest, when they were
placed under a new Forest law of extraordinary harshness, which even in
the Conqueror's time indeed demanded an eye or a hand for the taking
of game, and in the days of the Red King the life of a man for the life
of a beast.
The Conqueror, as we know, greatly enlarged the old "royal hunting
ground" here in Hampshire when he made the New Forest, and that act of
his which brought an immensely larger area than of old under a new and
incredibly harsher forest law gradually produced a legend of
devastation and depopulation here which, as I have already said, can no
longer be accepted as true. Henry of Huntingdon (1084?-1155) asserts
that "to form the hunting ground of the New Forest he (William) caused
churches and villages to be destroyed, and, driving out the people,
made it a habitation for deer.
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