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 renewal of the Laws of St. Edward, or the ancient Saxon laws, as our historians and law-writers generally, though very groundlessly, assert.  They bear no resemblance in any particular to the Laws of St. Edward, or to any other collection of these ancient institutions.  Indeed, how should they?  The object of Magna Charta is the correction of the feudal policy, which was first introduced, at least in any regular form, at the Conquest, and did not subsist before it.  It may be further observed, that in the preamble to the Great Charter it is stipulated that the barons shall hold the liberties there granted to them and their heirs, from the king and his heirs; which shows that the doctrine of an unalienable tenure was always uppermost in their minds.  Their idea even of liberty was not (if I may use the expression) perfectly free; and they did not claim to possess their privileges upon any natural principle or independent bottom, but just as they held their lands from the king.  This is worthy of observation.

By the Feudal Law, all landed property is, by a feigned conclusion, supposed to be derived, and therefore to be mediately or immediately held, from the crown.  If some estates were so derived, others were certainly procured by the same original title of conquest by which the crown itself was acquired, and the derivation from the king could in reason only be considered as a fiction of law.  But its consequent rights being once supposed, many real charges and burdens grew from a fiction made only for the preservation of subordination; and in consequence of this, a great power was exercised