a prelate and a marshal of France, on commoners caught breaking the game laws or carrying guns.  All four publicly escape punishment.”  In Artois, a parish makes declaration that “on the lands of the Chattellany the game devours all the avêtis (pine saplings) and that the growers of them will be obliged to abandon their business.”  Not far off; at Rumancourt, at Bellone, “the hares, rabbits and partridges entirely devour them, Count d’Oisy never hunting nor having hunts.”  In twenty villages in the neighborhood around Oisy where he hunts it is on horseback and across the crops.  “His game-keepers, always armed, have killed several persons under the pretense of watching over their master’s rights. . . .  The game, which greatly exceeds that of the royal captaincies, consumes annually all prospects of a crop, twenty thousand razières of wheat and as many of other grains.”  In the bailiwick of Evreux “the game has just destroyed everything up to the very houses. . . .  On account of the game the citizen is not free to pull up the weeds in summer which clog the grain and injure the seed sown. . . .  How many women are there without husbands, and children without fathers, on account of a poor hare or rabbit!” The game-keepers of the forest of Gouffray in Normandy “are so terrible that they maltreat, insult and kill men. . . .  I know of farmers who, having pleaded against the lady to be indemnified for the loss of their wheat, not only lost their time but their crops and the expenses of the trial. . . .  Stags and deer are seen roving around our houses in open daylight.”  In the bailiwick of Domfront, “the inhabitants of more than ten parishes are obliged to watch all night for more than six months of the year to secure their crops.[53] -This is the effect of tile right of the chase in the provinces.  It is, however, in the Ile-de-France, where captaincies abound, and become more extensive, that the spectacle is most lamentable.  A procés-verba1 shows that in the single parish of Vaux, near Meulan, the rabbits of warrens in the vicinity ravage eight hundred cultivated arpents (acres) of ground and destroy the crops of two thousand four hundred setiers (three acres each), that is to say, the annual supplies of eight hundred persons.  Near that place, at la Rochette, herds of deer and of stags devour everything in the fields during the day, and, at night, they even invade the small gardens of the inhabitants to consume vegetables and to break down young trees.  It is found impossible in a territory subjected to a captaincy to retain vegetables safe in gardens, enclosed by high walls.  At Farcy, of five hundred peach trees planted in a vineyard and browsed on by stags, only twenty remain at the end of three years.  Over the whole territory of Fontainebleau, the communities, to save their vines, are obliged to maintain, with the assent always of the captaincy, a gang of watchmen who, with licensed dogs, keep watch and make a hubbub all night from the