Everyone who has seen a Robin Hood movie knows that hunting in royal forests was the exclusive right of the king and those nobles on whom the king bestowed the privilege. Anyone else caught poaching the king’s deer paid dearly. What is less well known is that dogs that did not belong to those with the privilege of hunting royal precincts suffered a painful mutilation if their masters lived in or near a royal forest, regardless of whether the dogs were ever used in hunting. This mutilation was called expeditation, which was described as being administered to a mastiff as follows: “the mastive being brought to set one of his forefeet upon a peece of wood of eight inches thicke, and a foot square, the one with a mallet, setting a chissell of two inches broad upon the three clawes of his forefoot, at one blow doth smite them cleane off, and this is the manner of Expeditating of Mastives.”
George R. Jesse, who describes the laws of expeditation in two chapters of his book on the ancient laws, charters, and historical records of British dogs, published in 1866, notes that though this crippling may not have been intended to take the claws off without the skin, “it is impossible to amputate three claws at one blow with a straight tool in that manner, without cutting off part of the foot.” Indeed this was excruciatingly painful to the dog and some must have died from the inevitable infections.
Jesse relies on Manwood’s Laws of the Forest, published in 1598, for the proposition that the law of expeditation was enacted during the reign of Henry the Second, King of England from 1154 to 1189, meaning that Robin Hood and his men, if one accepts the popular dating of the legend, would have encountered crippled dogs in their wanderings in Sherwood Forest. King John was crowned ten years after the death of Henry II.
Maiming dogs to prevent their disturbing the king’s game goes back to Denmark, according to Jesse, who cites similar laws in the Constitutions of King Canutus, issued about 1016. Jesse acknowledges that the Normans did not engage in this practice, and finds no evidence that it was ever done in France. Henry III (1216 - 1272) allowed certain abbots and monks to hunt royal forests, and thereby not to have their dogs expeditated. Since this was after King John, we may argue that even Friar Tuck, if he had a large dog, would have been subject to a fine if it had not been maimed as required by law.
Expeditation, if the laws for administering the procedure were followed (it may be doubted whether they were always enforced), was not done randomly but rather under the jurisdiction of a specific “Forest Court,” called a “Court of Regard.” Courts of Regard, according to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765 – 1769) were to be held every third year “for the lawing or expeditation of mastiffs, which is done by cutting off the claws and ball (or pelote) of the forefeet, to prevent them from running after deer.” Blackstone says that mastiffs were to be allowed in the maimed fashion so that dwellers of the forest could have dogs large enough to protect their houses. Expeditation was ordered by Forest Courts as late as the reign of King James I in the early 17th century, and perhaps even after the Restoration in the reign of Charles II (1660 – 1685).
There were 69 large royal forests by the time of King Henry VIII. Although many of the laws, and exemptions from the expeditation laws, refer to mastiffs, and Blackstone says the expeditation laws only applied to mastiffs, there is evidence that any large dog could be expeditated. There remains in existence a gauge, shown here as drawn by Jesse (whose initials are visible on the left curve), that was used at Bowland Forest, Lancashire, to determine if a dog was of a size to be expeditated. The gauge, preserved at Browsholme, is a loop of about seven inches by five inches on the inside. A dog that could not pass through the loop was expeditated or killed, according to Jesse. Robert Parker, the current owner of Browsholme, points out, however, that an occasional display of the gauge may have discouraged most forest dwellers from even thinking about getting a large dog. It must be considered that the threat of expeditation may have influenced size preferences for dogs in certain areas of England, and may thus have been a factor in the development of certain breeds in an era before there were formal breeding programs. A short-legged but powerful dog, which would describe a number of terrier breed groups, would have had considerable appeal.
Hunting with bows and arrows but without dogs would have been a considerable challenge in Sherwood Forest. A group of outlaws would have needed dogs to raise the alarm on strangers approaching, as well as dogs for the chase. Dogs can also be trained to retrieve arrows that miss their mark. I believe Robin Hood and his merry men would have had to keep their dogs from being maimed under the expeditation laws. They would have helped the dogs.
Sources: George R. Jesse, Researches into the History of the British Dog, From Ancient Laws, Charters, and Historical Records (Robert Hardwicke, London, 1866) (available in numerous modern reprints); Rawdon B. Lee, A History & Description of the Modern Dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (Sporting Division) (Horace Cox, London, 1893), 282, 370 (describing setters and retrievers as retrieving boults and arrows that miss the mark); R.H.A. Merlen (1971) De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity. J.A. Allen, London (arguing in Chapter 10 that expeditation was actually a less crippling form of "lawing" than what had been practiced before the time of Henry II).
Note on the derivation of terms. The Oxford English Dictionary can be cited for deriving expeditation from the Latin, expeditare, implying something is taken from the foot. The OED gives a forest charter from 1502 as the earliest usage ("He of whom the hounds were not expeditate."). Depeditation, taking off the whole foot, was a word coined by Dr. Johnson, according to James Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides, but was not used by Johnson with respect to dogs. Related terms given by Jesse include genucission, hoxing, hocksinewing, hambling, hozing, lawing, espealtare, espeuteisoun, spelotte, and footing. Some of these words, however, applied to other crippling procedures, such as cutting the sinews on the legs of greyhounds to prevent them from chasing game. Greyhounds were usually prohibited from being possessed by commoners in royal forests.
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