This book is about the series of attacks on parks, chases, and forests in southern England during the late spring and summer of 1642. It is also about the words used to define the meanings of the attacks and about how these words were weighted with the histories of the places where the attacks occurred. Many of those who killed deer or cut down woods during this summer of violence justified their actions as a defense of high principles, claiming the moral authority of law and commonwealth. Their words evoked the long histories of communities embedded in the royal forests or perched on the margins of forests, those great hunting preserves of the English crown and nobility. As early as October 1641, neighbors on the southeastern border of Windsor Forest had justified attacks on the king's deer as a defense of their “ancient customs” and the status of their lands as liberty of purlieu rather than forest, and these attacks continued in the following year. In late April 1642, hunters in Waltham Forest cited the limits of settled law as a defense for killing deer. This book tells the political histories that lay behind this choice of words and actions in 1642.