While King Edward was narrating to the Norman Duke all that he knew, and all that he knew not, of Hilda's history and secret arts, the road wound through lands as wild and wold-like as if the metropolis of England lay a hundred miles distant.

Even to this day patches of such land, in the neighbourhood of Norwood, may betray what the country was in the old time:--when a mighty forest, "abounding with wild beasts"-- "the bull and the boar"-- skirted the suburbs of London, and afforded pastime to king and thegn.

For the Norman kings have been maligned by the popular notion that assigns to them all the odium of the forest laws.

Harsh and severe were those laws in the reign of the Anglo-Saxon; as harsh and severe, perhaps, against the ceorl and the poor man, as in the days of Rufus, though more mild unquestionably to the nobles.

To all beneath the rank of abbot and thegn, the king's woods were made, even by the mild Confessor, as sacred as the groves of the Druids: and no less penalty than that of life was incurred by the lowborn huntsman who violated their recesses.