The death of Waltheof and the popular judgement on it suggest another act of William’s which cannot have been far from it in point of time, and about which men spoke in his own day in the same spirit.  If the judgement of God came on William for the beheading of Waltheof, it came on him also for the making of the New Forest.  As to that forest there is a good deal of ancient exaggeration and a good deal of modern misconception.  The word forest is often misunderstood.  In its older meaning, a meaning which it still keeps in some parts, a forest has nothing to do with trees.  It is a tract of land put outside the common law and subject to a stricter law of its own, and that commonly, probably always, to secure for the King the freer enjoyment of the pleasure of hunting.  Such a forest William made in Hampshire; the impression which it made on men’s minds at the time is shown by its having kept the name of the New Forest for eight hundred years.  There is no reason to think that William laid waste any large tract of specially fruitful country, least of all that he laid waste a land thickly inhabited; for most of the Forest land never can have been such.  But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did afforest a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart for the purposes of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel laws—­stopping indeed short of death—­for the protection of his pleasures, and in this process some men lost their lands, and were driven from their homes.  Some destruction of houses is here implied; some destruction of churches is not unlikely.  The popular belief, which hardly differs from the account of writers one degree later than Domesday and the Chronicle, simply exaggerates the extent of destruction.  There was no such wide-spread laying waste as is often supposed, because no such wide-spread laying waste was needed.  But whatever was needed for William’s purpose was done; and Domesday gives us the record.  And the act surely makes, like the death of Waltheof, a downward stage in William’s character.  The harrying of Northumberland was in itself a far greater crime, and involved far more of human wretchedness.  But it is not remembered in the same way, because it has left no such abiding memorial.  But here again the lesser crime needed a worse man to do it.  The harrying of Northumberland was a crime done with a political object; it was the extreme form of military severity; it was not vulgar robbery done with no higher motive than to secure the fuller enjoyment of a brutal sport.  To this level William had now sunk.  It was in truth now that hunting in England finally took the character of a mere sport.  Hunting was no new thing; in an early state of society it is often a necessary thing.  The hunting of Alfred is spoken of as a grave matter of business, as part of his kingly duty.  He had to make war on the wild beasts, as he had to make war on the Danes.  The hunting of William is simply a sport, not his duty or his business, but merely his pleasure.  And to this pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting pain and slaughter, he did not scruple to sacrifice the rights of other men, and to guard his enjoyment by ruthless laws at which even in that rough age men shuddered.