Michael Drayton

Michael Drayton's allegorical representation of Buckholt Forest, Hampshire, in Poly-Olbion

Aims and Objectives

The purpose of the project is to raise awareness of, excite interest in, and win funding for systematic, comprehensive, multi-disciplinary investigation of the Forests and Chases of England and Wales: in particular their spatial, temporal, functional, and cultural origins, significance, and survival. Here are some of the more important topics addressed by the project team and other scholars involved in this area.

Social and economic
The emergence of forests and their relationship to pre-Conquest 'common pool resources'

Allied with this, the processes and results of afforestation and disafforestation

Aristocratic patronage and perquisites, and their relationship to royal and aristocratic hunting
Livelihood for the marginalised (as exemplified in squatting, poor's woods and commons)
Swanimote and other courts (among the oldest forms of local self-determination, crucial to

recovering pre-modern communitas)

Forests as expressions of kingship and theatres of power
Cultural diversity, including religion (particularly early-modern Recusancy and medieval imagery)
Demography, including squatting, and economic linkages
Poaching, protest and riot, including resistance to afforestation and later to the game laws

Ecological and environmental
Changes in habits of 'hunting and gathering' as a major element of pre-industrial agrarian and

domestic regimes

The march of medieval assarting and post-medieval enclosure

The origins and uses of vaccaries
Fuel demands, particularly as impacting on forest commons
The spread of country house parkland as social expression and landscape component
The onset of 'scientific' forestry and state management
Transitional hunting landscapes (alongside developments in horse-breeding, -trading, and

-racing, and military theory and practice)

Scholarly and public policy
Human ecotypes as a model of discourse and analysis
Modernity and alternative frameworks for describing the survival of forest societies and

economy

Cartography, including its use as a tool of state governance
Landscape evaluation; and Countryside access and management
and their relevance to conservation, sustainability, and renewable resources.

Data exists in documents, maps and plans, literature, and fieldwork, and the results of results will continue to be disseminated to scholars and the wider public electronically as well as in print and through workshops, papers, and lectures.

The partial state of knowledge about forests and chases is typified by the need to ask 'How many forests survived into and through early modern times?' (For an introductory discussion, click on the title in the side panel.) A summary of the perceived significance of the research, written for a general readership, is also accessible from the panel: 'The case for further research', together with 'Seeing the wood for the trees', an article in the St John's College journal, TW.