The year was 1598, and if you wanted to keep a dog in an English forest, you were going to have to obey some seriously complicated rules. In some places, certain men could keep greyhounds or mastiffs. In others, it was “little dogs” only.
And if you wanted a spaniel? Well, you had better get a grant from the king, or risk serious legal consequences.These, and other rules, are laid out in a treatise by John Manwood, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn in London. Manwood was also a gamekeeper of Waltham Forest, and Justice in Eyre—a judge of a particular kind of court—of the New Forest under Queen Elizabeth I. The book was first published for private circulation in 1592, then publicly in 1598. For centuries, it was the go-to guide for forest law. This 1598 edition is the oldest book in the library of London’s Kennel Club—the self-professed “biggest dog library” in Europe. (To be clear, it’s the biggest library of books about dogs, rather than the biggest library where you can borrow dogs—or the library where you can borrow the biggest dogs.)
Lawes of the Forrest was simply the short form of the title. Its full 141-word title promised, among other things, to explain the legal difference between such woodland spots as a forest, a chase, a park and a warren. But in this rambling text, it is Chapter 16 that’s…
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