and other soil, inclosed within their bounds.
Here the king had separate courts and particular justiciaries; a
complete jurisprudence, with all its ceremonies and terms of art, was
formed; and it appears that these laws were better digested and more
carefully enforced than those which belonged to civil government. They
had, indeed, all the qualities of the worst of laws. Their professed
object was to keep a great part of the nation desolate. They hindered
communication and destroyed industry. They had a trivial object, and
most severe sanctions; for, as they belonged immediately to the king's
personal pleasures, by the lax interpretation of treason in those days,
all considerable offences against the Forest Law, such as killing the
beasts of game, were considered as high treason, and punished, as high
treason then was, by truncation of limbs and loss of eyes and testicles.
Hence arose a thousand abuses, vexatious suits, and pretences for
imposition upon all those who lived in or near these places. The deer
were suffered to run loose upon their lands; and many oppressions were
used with relation to the claim of commonage which the people had in
most of the forests. The Norman kings were not the first makers of the
Forest Law; it subsisted under the Saxon and Danish kings. Canute the
Great composed a body of those laws, which still remains. But under the
Norman kings they were enforced with greater rigor, as the whole tenor
of the Norman government was more rigorous. Besides, new forests were
frequently made, by which private property was outraged in a grievous
manner. Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly how little men are able to
depart from the common course of affairs than that the Norman kings,
princes of great capacity, and extremely desirous of absolute power, did
not think of peopling these forests, places under their own uncontrolled
dominion, and which might have served as so many garrisons dispersed
throughout the country. The Charter of the Forests had for its object
the disafforesting several of those tracts, the prevention of future
afforestings, the mitigation and ascertainment of the punishments for
breaches of the Forest Law.

The Common Law, as it then prevailed in England, was in a great measure
composed of some remnants of the old Saxon customs, joined to the feudal
institutions brought in at the Norman Conquest. And it is here to be
observed, that the constitutions of Magna Charta are by no means a
r