The Presidential Address.
35
By the middle of the 11th century, the population having
considerably increased, and increasing rapidly, being esti-
mated at less than two millions in England at the Domesday
Survey, and at over three millions by the year 1300,81 the
increased demand for corn made the afforestations of the
Norman kings felt as a cruel hardship. A Norman hunting-
forest was often as much open common as actual woodland;
but its essential character was that all tillage within its
boundaries was prohibited.82 Without actual planting having
81 Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers ('History of Agriculture and Prices')
expresses his opinion that the population of England and Wales could
not have exceeded two and a half millions in the 14th century. "Such
calculations must partly depend on the amount of corn consumed to the
head, and modern estimates differ from five and a half to eight bushels.
Professor Rogers argues on the higher number, and if the lower be the
correct estimate that alone would imply a difference of more than a
million in the population."—Pearson, op. cit., p. viii.
82 "The original significance of the word 'forest' is that land which
was outside (Latin foris) the 'ham,' 'mark,' or 'ton,'—that is, the
home-farm or tilled land of the township—which was not cleared, or
felled, not in 'fields,' and not under the same laws as the agricultural
land which had itself once formed part of the primaeval forest. Thus the
forest was part of the 'common' lands of the early village communities,
who felled its timber for firewood or for building, and turned their cattle
to graze in its open spaces, or to feed on the masts and acorns of its
woodlands. Probably large tracts of land in many parts of Great Britain
have never been covered with timber trees within the historical period,
yet were forests in the strict sense of the word. This forest land was
not subject to that periodical redistribution and primitive system of
rotation of crops which applied to the 'common fields' of the com-
munity ; and thus, when the Continental feudalism superseded the early
English village system, the forest lands fell more completely into the
hands of the Crown and the nobility, the 'lords of the manor,' subject
generally, however, to the 'common rights' of topping and lopping,
cutting turf, pasturage, &c, varying in different cases."—"The Science
and Teaching of Forestry," by G. S. Boulger, 'Journal of Forestry,'
1882. "The forests of England were regarded, at least from the time of
the Conquest, as the peculiar and personal property of the king, subject
to his uncontrolled jurisdiction, and out of the scope of the common law
of the realm. In origin they were probably the remaining unenclosed
woodlands which had been national," i.e., communal, "property, and
became royal demesne in the eleventh century, . . . enclosed, with very
extensive additions, as hunting grounds by the Conqueror and his sons."
—Stubbs, op. cit., p. 149.