offender liable to punishment.[1] And at the present day there is among the grand old oaks of Bagot's Park, in Needwood Forest, a peculiarly wide-spreading one, known as the Beggars' Oak, beneath whose branches, so the popular belief has it, any wayfarer has the right to a night's lodging. This tradition must date from a period earlier than the enclosure of the park from the forest, and must point, like the preceding one, to some prehistoric common right, disregarded at the time of the enclosure, but still existing in the popular imagination.[2]
Another instance of ancient rights—Wrottesley Park, granted to the Wrottesleys by Edward III. in 1347—is bounded by a belt of uncultivated land, a sort of "green lane," called the Deerleap, a name which is also found (under a slightly different form) in a pre-Conquest list of boundaries preserved at Wrottesley. The same name, the Deerleap, is also given to a field adjoining an old park at Norbury, existing in the fourteenth century, but now long destroyed. For an explanation of this name we must go to the neighbouring county of Salop, where the owners of an old park, existing in 1292, but now cut up into fields, claimed the right of the buck's leap, namely, the right to cut timber to repair the park fence for the space of a buck^s leap—five yards—on their neighbour's land outside the park. This right, which I need not say is unknown to the statute-book, was actually exercised in 1892.
Again, we may trace the forest influence on annual sports and festivals in the Horn-dance at Abbot's Bromley. At the parish wake every year, on the Monday after the 4th of September, six men carrying stags' horns on their
- ↑ Natural History of Staffordshire, ch. viii., § 23.
- ↑ I can obtain no definite information as to the date of the grant of Bagot's Park, but tradition says it was given to the Bagots by King John, who also gave the ancestors of the ancient breed of goats preserved there, on the preservation of which the existence of the Bagot family and their estates is imagined to depend.
