While, however, the abolition of the deer has greatly elevated the tone of public morality in the Forest, it has without doubt increased the hardship of life to the labouring portion of the community. For it is manifest life with plenty to eat is a very different thing from life with an empty stomach. Formerly it was meat every day, and as much as they liked; now it must be something very different, seeing that the ordinary wages of a New Forest labourer vary from ten to twelve shillings a week. A carter gets a shilling more, and is allowed a house and garden rent-free.
Under the old state of things the harshness of the law was somewhat balanced by a number of privileges enjoyed by the foresters, such as the right of pasturage, and of getting wood, turf, and fern out of the Forest. It was found, however, that great abuses had crept in, and in 1848 the rights of the foresters were defined. As is usually the case in these legal arrangements, to those who had was given, while to those who had not was taken away that which they had. The result is that the poorer foresters have now no privileges whatever, except that of picking up the fallen pieces from the trees and pulling up the furze stumps, locally called "blacks," after a fire.
Those, however, who put in their claims, and could show anything like a title, seem to have retained their right of pasturage, and many are thus enabled to keep a horse or a cow. Some keep asses, and some rear a few of the ponies, which are now as much a feature of the Forest as the deer formerly were. Pigs also can be turned out during masting-time, to eat the beech-nuts and acorns. Wood, too, can be bought for fuel.
Moreover, the neighbourhood of the Forest presents so many opportunities whereby a shrewd and industrious man may fairly increase his income, that it does not appear that the poverty of the district is anything like so severe as it is in many other parts of agricultural England.
From autumn to spring is the time for felling the larger timber. First the fir, then the beech, lastly the oak. In the spring the young trees in the enclosures, locally called "flitterns," have to be thinned. Then comes the hay harvest, and the turf, and fern seasons, while all the year round there is work of some kind going on—making fresh enclosures, cutting brambles and brushwood, hedging, ditching, and draining.
