FORESTRY Although a considerable proportion of the offenders were dead before the eyre was held, the rolls of venison and vert trespassers show no fewer than 517 separate charges extending over the thirty-four years since the last pleas. The gravest charge at this eyre, as at the last, was against an earl of Derby. Robert Earl Ferrers was presented for having in 1264, with a great company of knights and others, hunted in the Campana forest on 7 July and taken forty head of deer and drove another forty out of the forest ; and on I August took fifty and drove away about seventy ; and again on 29 September took forty and drove away a like number. This hunting was planned on a wholesale scale, for thirty-eight are named in the presentment, and there were many others, as well as the earl himself, who were dead before the eyre was held, and others not summoned as they were mere servants of the earl. Eight out of the thirty-eight were knights, and one, Master Nicholas de Marnham, rector of Doddington, Lincoln, was in holy orders. Of those in the earl's train during these three forest affrays hardly any bore Derbyshire names, but came from the counties of Warwick, Leicestershire, Lancashire, York, Cambridge, etc. It has been strangely enough remarked by the only writer who has hitherto cited these presentments (Mr. Yeatman) that 'these tremendous charges,' made long after the earl was dead, 'are utterly incomprehensible,' adding that it seems impossible to suppose that the earl had not full license from the crown to indulge in hunting in the royal forest ! But this writer had clearly forgotten the date of these forest invasions of the young and impetuous Earl Ferrers. It was in 1264, in the very thick of the baronial civil war under Simon de Montfort, of whose cause Robert Ferrers was a hot partisan. On 12 May was fought the battle of Lewes, when the king's forces under Prince Edward (Edward I.) were defeated by those of the barons. For two or three years from that date, as an old chronicler has it, 'there was grievous perturbation in the centre of the realm,' in which Derbyshire pre-eminently shared. There can be no doubt whatever that the three incursions made into the Peak forest in July, August, and September, following the battle of Lewes, were undertaken by Robert Ferrers and his allies (issuing from his great manor house of Hartington) much more to show contempt for the king's forest and preserves and to get booty, than for any purposes of sport. These presentments, if they did nothing else, were a strong protest against the lawlessness of such action. In April of this year Henry III. had come into Derbyshire and lodged for a time at the castle of the Peak after the subjection of Nottingham, and it was from here that he proceeded into Kent and Sussex. The king's sojourn here before the battle of Lewes is expressly named in another presentment against Thomas de Furnival, the great lord of Sheffield. Thomas, who was that year bailiff of the Peak, entertained the king at the castle and tarried there until Whitsuntide. On this occasion, after the king had left, the bailiff entered the forest and killed twelve beasts. On various subsequent occasions, both in the reign of Henry III. and Edward I., venison was killed in this forest and taken to Thomas de Furnival's castle at Sheffield. Thomas appeared before the justices and was convicted and imprisoned, but was subsequently released at the king's pleasure for a fine of 200 marks. they tarried were the Peak, the Lancashire forests of Blackburnshire and Bowland, and the wolds of Yorkshire. It has been confidently asserted (Elaine, Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports [1858], p. 105) that entries of payment for the destruction of wolves appear in the account books of certain parishes of the East Riding, presumably of the sixteenth or seventeenth century date, but this on examination proves to be an error. They were abundant in Dean forest in the time of Edward I., and tenures of land in the forests of Rockingham and Shirewood on the service of wolf-hunting were renewed in the fifteenth century. The best authorities consider that wolves did not die out in England until the time of Henry VII., 1485-1509. Harting, Extinct Brit, dnimals, 1 15, 205 ; Lydekker, Brit. Mammalia, 95-8 ; Strutt, Sports and Pastimes (1903 ed.), 12, 13. Place and field names afford remarkably abundant evidence of the considerable presence of wolves in North Derbyshire. Woolow (formerly spelt Wolflow), Wolfhope, and Wolfscote, are well known examples. Wolfscote Dale, though not often used, is still the 1 map-name for the upper stretch of Dovedale, and Wolfscote Grange, and Wolfscote Hill are close to the forest border. On the opposite side of the Dove, in Staffordshire, is the ridge termed Wolfedge. The village boys of Hartington and Berisford Dale used to play at wolves and wolf-hunting in the ' forties ' of last century, apparently a traditionary game as stated by the late Mr. Beresford Hope. Five cases of wolf in the field names of enclosures within the bounds of the old forest have been found, whilst Wolfpit occurs as a boundary of Priestcliffe common, and Wolfstone of Chinley common in enclosure commissions, temp. Charles I. Among the evidences at St. Mary's College, Spink Hill, is a charter of Robert Ferrers, earl of Derby (who died in 1 1 39), granting lands at Heage, which he held from the king on the service of driving the wolves out of his lordship of Belper, within Duffield Chase, which afterwards became a royal forest. 45
