Forests and Chases, c. 1000 to c. 1850: Towards a Multidisciplinary Survey
The phrase 'half our history' could quite reasonably be applied, in an anecdotal way, to describe the gradual disappearance of the hunting-and-gathering side of our ancient rural economy. In this old way of providing for our food, clothing, and healthcare, hunting-and-gathering was balanced by the production of crops and animals - farming - which has now all but overwhelmed it. And with the hunting and gathering has gone also a way of life, what human geographers call an eco-system and historians describe in terms of society, economy and culture. In terms of area too, the phrase is not inappropriate, for the forests and chases of England and Wales - those districts where forest law, not the Common Law ran - covered a third to two-thirds of several historic counties at their greatest extent.
If forests and chases were so important, don't we already know all there is to know (or rather, all that is worth knowing) about them? It seems not. Certainly much has been written about their fortunes in the Middle Ages. This is because of what might be called the 'Robin Hood' version of British history. It depicts the Norman kings imposing restrictive laws on their previously free Anglo-Saxon and Welsh subjects - and none more restrictive than forest law by which they used and, crucially, extended forests to raise money, pursue pleasure, and exploit the common folk. When Charles I returned the royal forests to their fullest medieval extent, to help pay the country's bills, this version of history became part of the rhetoric in favour of constitutional monarchy. Now that the latter is practically a dead letter and parliamentary democracy has set up a Department of Constitutional Affairs, many of the issues which flow from this reading of history are ripe for reassessment. However, it is not helpful in the development of such processes as landscape evaluation for purposes of planning and countryside access and management, and debates over sustainability and renewable resources, if our understanding of the
nature and uses of the forests, both in the Middle Ages and what has been called their 'after-life'
in the period from around 1500 is only partial and open to question.
Anecdotal and piecemeal research aided by seedcorn funding by St John's College, Oxford, suggested that this is so.
Up to then it was not even known how many forests and chases there were (the published numbers varied considerably), or where ran their successive bounds - no two maps agreed. Establishing numbers and extents is not helped by fluidity in terminology - notably in the interchangeable words 'forest' and 'chase'. Furthermore, not all forests were royal, as commonly supposed, nor all chases owned by the nobility. Conventional wisdom asserts that forests and chases quickly disappeared after about 1600, due to royal anxiety to raise money from their sale and growing demand on timber for houses in cities and towns and ships for trade and empire, and fuel for hearths and furnaces. While it is true that enclosure, attrition of the commons, and other aspects of the Agricultural Revolution resulted in the eventual demise of most forests (with notable exceptions such as the New Forest, Epping, and Dean), the rate at which this happened is unclear. It may well have varied region by region according to circumstances which are not fully understood. Physical reduction is at odds with the huge sums which it appears were changing hands in exchange for forest offices right up to the nineteenth century. Litigation appears rife, too - which with forest-related franchising and legislation could provide an index of peers' involvement in the politics of their localities. Signs of the enormous value of forest patronage and perquisites are evident even in Victoria's reign.
Nor does demise explain the longevity of forest courts, not only the royal forest eyres, but private courts also, and, most especially the commoners' courts known as Swanimotes. These, hardly known and little understood, arguably constitute our oldest form of self-determination, potentially crucial for those historians moving us on from a lords-and-peasants reading of history to one in which community and individual action are the key parts of the social and economic machinery. By the same token, little is known about forest commons and the provisions made on disafforestation for compensation to cottagers in the form of 'poors' woods', how quickly they came under pressure and how stoutly they were defended. The gift of the king, they illustrate a further apparent misapprehension. Cottagers, especially the squatters who found refuge and livelihood in the forests, seem to have had good reason to regret the passing of lightly-administered royal ownership into what might be heavier private supervision and robust 'improvement'. However, demographer have still to collect the data and do the sums which would allow judgements to be made. Likewise recusants and other religious nonconformists appear to have flourished in forest areas, but definitive accounts of the former have hardly begun to be written, partly because of other aspects of our received historiographies in which 'Catholic' is synonymous with 'disloyal', and partly because many forest and former forest areas were ecclesiastically extra-parochial and lack documentation. The social effects of extra-parochiality are similarly little examined, while the account of forests as locales of protest has taken second place to descriptions of riot in industrial towns and semi-industrial villages.
The project seeks to bring together historians, geographers, and ecologists to explore these and other partially understood issues in a systematic, comprehensive, and collaborative way. For example,
what was the process of afforestation and how did it relate to pre-Conquest
land-uses? For a very much later period, theories are advanced for the transition from deer-hunting to fox-hunting landscapes but no systematic investigation has been made as to how and why this happened. Similarly awaiting systematic study is the regional and temporal rise of the country house park and its relationship to the demise of forests. Ecologists, too, have their knowledge gaps, for example in relation to what happens to woodland vegetation dynamics and the interaction of flora and fauna after hunting ceases or takes new forms, or under new ownership or management. The transition from royal demesne to the Office of Woods to the Forestry Commission is under-chronicled, so that the ecological impacts following changes in policy, approach and personnel still await close study and analysis.
The project team have begun with colleagues
elsewhere to put these and other issues under scrutiny so as to produce the
first systematic and comprehensive account of English and Welsh forests and
chases from circa 1000 to circa 1850. Those likely to benefit
include non-academic users such as public agencies, rural and tourist-related
business, and voluntary groups, as well as academic researchers and teachers in
higher and secondary education.
