The Master of the Rolls, Sir George Jessel, decided on
Tues- day that Epping Forest should never be enclosed. A year or two ago the forest was rapidly disappearing, the neighbouring lords of manors taking it bit by bit, when the Corporation of London resolved to defend the rights of the public, and prayed aninjunction against the appropriators of anyiand taken within the last twenty years. The defendants, of course, fought hard, collected masses of needless evidence, and would have ruined any private suitor; but the Corporation fought it through, and Sir George Jesse' has now decided that the " waste " of the forest, 4,000 acres, is not "common manorial," in other words, subject to enclosure by the lord, with the consent of the commoners, but " common appur- tenant,"—that is, requiring the consent of all tenants of lands in the twenty parishes adjacent. This consent can never be obtained, and therefore all land taken since 1851 must be surrendered, and all further attempts at enclosure must be abandoned. The appropriators; moreover, are condemned to pay all costs, which are described as immense. The judgment, a most elabo- rate but lucid piece of reasoning, will raise the repute even of Sir George Jessel, and its effect is to save for East Londoners their most valuable recreation-ground. Should it be. upheld, as seems probable, a final compromise might, perhaps, be effected by a short Act declaring the title of the old enclosures, and forbidding all further encroachments whatever without the written consent of the Crown. That would place the Forest under Parliamentary control, and interfere with no right of any value.
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