ITS HISTORY 3
with determined opposition, especially in the
county of Essex, when my sturdy fellow-county-
men were guilty of some " fashious actions " and
even had the impudence to hold a " conventicle "
" in the very brake where the king's stag should
have been lodged for his hunting the next morn-
ing." The result was that in the first session of
the Long Parliament an Act was passed to fix the
Forest boundaries, and a perambulation was made
which showed that Waltham Forest comprised
60,000 acres. It must not be supposed, how-
ever, that the whole of this wide area was wood-
land and heath. In the time of the Tudors there
is reason to believe that four-fifths were under
some sort of cultivation, but at the same time the
whole was strictly subject to the Forest laws and
regulations for the time being; and the interests
of the cultivator, of the commoner who turned
his cattle out to graze on the Forest, of the owner
of the soil, and of the public, were subordinate to
the sporting rights of the Crown.
Previous to the time of Henry VIII, nearly
the whole of the ownership of the soil, subject to
the sporting rights of the Crown, was vested in
the powerful religious bodies of that day; such
as the Abbey of Waltham, of which some account
is given at page 51, which had received them as
grants from various monarchs, pious or rapacious,
in return for benefits of a spiritual or substantial
character; but other rights and favours were also
constantly granted to ecclesiastics, among whom
the Abbess of Barking seems to have been espe-
cially favoured, as the following extract shows:
"We command you to allow the Abbess of
Barking her reasonable estovers in her wood at
Hainault for her firing, her cooking, and her brew-
ing, if she has been accustomed so to do in the
time of our Lord King John our father; also to
permit the same abbess to have her dogs to chase
hares and foxes within the bailiwick if she was
accustomed to have them in the time of our afore-
said father." At the time of the Reformation
these rights reverted, or were reannexed, by the