It was the French-speaking lords of the Norse raiders settled in Neustria, now dukes of Normandy, who, by bringing their hunting law to England, brought their hunt within the compass of tyranny. The Norman kings built a strategic network of motte-and-bailey castles, then of stone keeps, while at the same time they established hunting preserves over vast tracts of the English countryside. Both enterprises, fortification and hunting, were to reflect cherished interests of a foreign military élite seeking to assert control of the land. It shall be the purpose of this chapter to track newly distinctive hunting tropes as they shaped and were shaped by the historical and cultural context of these preserves, the royal forests.

The extension of Norman power was hardly unique to England. Robert Bartlett's study of the “Frankish diaspora” has analyzed the impulse and scope of central European expansion in a centuries-long (but loosely concerted) pattern of conquering and then colonizing the northern margins of continental Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. This movement drew its centrifugal energy from the requirements of dynastic consolidation. Primogeniture's devolution of a landed estate wholly upon the first-born male descendant, a practice seeking to counter the break-up of power entailed by ancient Germanic inheritance customs, disinherited generations of young nobles for whom only marriage or military ventures offered likely means of pursuing their own landed fortunes. Chiefly the exploits of Norman scions, who founded lordships from Ireland to Constantinople, to Syria and Sicily, became characteristic of this Frankish dynamism. In central Europe lords who were able to retain their family holdings worked to expand these by inducing peasants to clear wilderness areas and bring them under the plow. Such policies of internal expansion, increasing the produce potential of feudal fiefs, often rewarded peasant colonists with enhanced legal control of their tenements. Those who undertook to conquer and colonize, on the other hand, stimulated external expansion by transferring central European modes of production to their conquests. Bartlett argues that such expansionism did not entail the absolute subordination of colonized states to the homeland of the colonizers, as was the case in modern imperialism. Newer political formations had the capacity to develop independently of their original matrix.

For our investigation we must observe that ducal forests were an important feature of Norman lordship.