Note 13 — Chapter III · ITS EARLY HISTORY.

Concerning the King’s prerogative to make a forest wherever he pleased, and the ancient legal maxim that all beasts of the chase were exclusively his and his alone, see Manwood—A Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest, ch. ii. ff. 25-33, and ch. iii. sect. i. f. 33, 1615. We must remember, too, that, before the afforestation, William not only owned by right of conquest, as being King, the large demesne lands of the Crown in the district, and also those estates of former possessors, who had fallen at Hastings, or fled into exile, but, as we know from Domesday, kept some—as at Eling, Breamore, and Ringwood—in his own hands.