CHAPTER VII. FORESTS OF EPPING AND HAINAULT. ONCE very extensive Forest of Epping was formerly called the Forest of Essex, being the only forest in that county, the whole of which was anciently comprehended in it. By a charter of King John, confirmed by Edward IV., all that part of the forest which lay to the north of the highway from Stortford to Colchester (very distant from the present boundaries) was disafforested. The forest was further reduced by a perambulation made in the year 1640. The boundaries then settled include the whole of eleven parishes, and parts of ten other parishes. The extent of the forest is estimated at 60,000 acres, of which 48,000 acres are calculated to be enclosed and private property; the remaining 12,000 acres are the unenclosed wastes and woods. As the extent of the forest became abridged, it was at first called Waltham Forest; but as the distance between that town and its outskirts was gradually increased by the forest-felling hatchet, it borrowed a name from a town more immediately in its thick recesses, and called itself Epping. As is common in ancient forests in the neighbourhood of man's wants, the trees in many parts of this forest are dwarfed in height by repeated loppings, and the boughs spring from the hollow gnarled boles of pollard oaks and beeches; the trunks, covered with mosses and whitening canker-stains, or wreaths of ivy, speak of remote an HUNTING IN EPPING FOREST. 131 tiquity; but the boughs which their lingering and mutilated life puts forth are either thin and feeble, with innumerable branchlets, or are centred on some solitary distorted limb which the woodman's axe has spared. The trees thus assume all manner of crooked, deformed, fantastic shapes-all betokening age, and all decay-all, despite of the solitude around, proclaiming the waste and ravages of man. Henry III. granted a privilege, in 1226, to the citizens of London to hunt once a year, at Easter, within a circuit of twenty miles of their city. In the olden times, therefore, the lord mayor, aldermen, and corporation, attended by a due number of their constituents, availed themselves of the right of chase "in solemn guise.” By the close of the sixteenth century, however, the citizens had discontinued to a great extent the pastime, not for want of taste for it, says Stowe, but for leisure to pursue it. Strype, nevertheless, so late as the reign of George I. reckons among the modern amusements of the Londoners, "riding on horseback and hunting with my lord mayor's hounds when the common hunt goes out." This common hunt of the citizens is ridiculed in an old ballad called "the London customs," of which we have selected the three following stanzas : "Next once a year into Essex a-hunting they go, To see 'em pass along, O, 'tis a most pretty show! Through Cheapside and Fenchurch Street, and so to Aldgate pump, Each man's with 's spurs in 's horse's sides, and his back-sword cross his rump. My lord he takes a staff in hand to beat the bushes o'er ; I must confess it was a work he ne'er had done before. A creature bounceth from a bush, which made them all to laugh; My lord he cried, A hare! a hare! but it proved an Essex calf. And when they had done their sport, they came to London where they dwell, For of twenty saddles carried out, they brought again but five." Always attentive to the means of ingratiating himself with the Londoners, towards the close of his reign Edward IV. invited the principal citizens to hunt with him in his forest of Waltham; a feast was spread for them under green bowers, and the courteous monarch refused to sit until he saw his guests served. With his usual gallantry towards the fair sex, he admitted them into a participation of the favours conferred upon their male relations; sending to the lady mayoress and her sisters, the aldermen's wives, two harts, six bucks, and a ton of wine, with which, we are told, they made merry in Drapers' Hall,1 The Epping Hunt is now entirely discontinued, as it had for many years become a mere pretext for a holiday to all the idle, dissolute, vagabondish people of London. In fact, there was no hunt. A deer was carted about from one public-house to another, the spectators gazing at the deer, and the deer gazing at the spectators, and the keepers drinking ale and eating beef until they could neither drink nor eat any more, when the stag was turned out and was soon captured, and the hunt was over. But the day's sport was not over; for there was always an "adjournment" after the running down of the stag, which resulted in late suppers, parabolical movements homewards, and dreadful headaches in the morning. The following graphic account of a Cockney sport, now happily dead, we give from the Illustrated London News: "The Epping Hunt, on Easter Monday, brings back many recollections of the good old days of suburban sports, when the Nimrods of the metropolis went forth, as in the earlier days of Chevy Chase, To hunt the deer with hound and horn,' and gathered in hosts as numerous in Epping Forest as did the borderers of Northumberland on the warlike frontiers of Scotland. Fortunately the sportsmen of the metropolis were not so pugnacious, or at least not so bloodthirsty, as their northern predecessors; for though it must be admitted that on more occasions than one the pleasures of the chase were diversified by a pugilistic encounter or two, arising from too vehement a desire to excel in the display of horsemanship, or from the resentment of indignation at being unhorsed and laughed at in the ardour of the pursuit, the combatants were never seriously injured, and a couple of black eyes and a bloody nose corrected the exuberance of momentary excitement, and restored the parties to reason. Easter Monday was a glorious day, not only for that class of sportsmen with which, in the days alluded to, Whitechapel and the northern districts of London abounded, but to the whole class of bold riders from every part of the town who could procure any thing in shape of a horse to carry them up to the hounds; and fortunate, perhaps, it was for some of the quadrupeds employed for that purpose that the hounds were tolerably well fed, or for the moment more anxious for sport than food, or it is much more than probable that 1 Fabian. |