A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

and Roman mining operations were on an industrial scale not seen again until the sixteenth century. The historian Dr Oliver Rackham has estimated that charcoal from over 9,300 hectares of coppiced wood was needed to fuel the military ironworks in the Weald alone.

      Considerable areas of wildwood were cleared to accommodate the large estates which now dominated the farming system, with their extensive cattle ranches, big sheep flocks and sufficiently improved cereal production to allow a surplus to be exported. Highly sophisticated methods of sylviculture were introduced, which enabled the Romans to manage the woodlands efficiently and meet the enormous demands on an inevitably limited natural resource. They were, of course, able to draw on experience acquired over centuries of woodland management elsewhere in the Empire and the knowledge of the most respected agriculturalists of the period, such as Lucius Columella, author of De arboribus and Rutilius Palladius, author of Opus agriculturae. The centuries-old system of coppicing woodland of mixed underwood and standards allowed to grow to maturity was continued, but in a much more productive manner. The Romans established a variety of cereal, vegetable, herb, fruit and tree species, the most important of which to sylviculture was sweet chestnut. Chestnut became one of the most valued coppicing timbers, and Stour Wood, an ancient chestnut wood near Harwich, is believed to grow on the site of a Roman chestnut plantation.

      With the collapse of the Roman Empire and expulsion of the Roman civilian administrators around AD 410, the Romano-British were left to fend for themselves in a country besieged by barbarians from all sides. The Picts and Scots swarmed hungrily over the abandoned Hadrian’s Wall; Angle, Jute and Saxon pirates harassed the coastal communities from the Tyne to the Tamar, whilst Norwegian and Irish raiders periodically amused themselves along the west coast from the Mersey to the Solway. Vortigern, the fifth-century king of the Britons, has been blamed for making matters considerably worse by employing Saxon mercenaries to fight for him and paying them with grants of land. In a relatively short space of time, the numbers of mercenaries had grown to a level where they were powerful enough to rebel, capturing the south-east lowlands and throwing the door open to a general invasion. For the next couple of centuries, Britain was plunged into a series of wars as Britons either fled to Brittany, hence the name, or were forced into Cornwall, parts of Scotland and the hills of Wales.

      There is no doubt that during the Dark Ages of early Anglo-Saxon Britain, almost every advance in civilisation introduced by the Romans was reversed. The great urban buildings, country villas, bath houses and temples were allowed to collapse, and with no central government, the industries that had once made Britain prosperous were neglected. The population, estimated at four million towards the end of the Roman occupation, rapidly fell to around two million. A natural consequence of this drop in population was a rapid expansion in woodland, which follows a simple law of nature overlooked by conservationists today, with their mania for planting: land left unused will inevitably become invaded by trees. In many areas, farms that had been laboriously reclaimed from woodland were gradually overtaken by secondary growth and intensively managed woods reverted to their natural form.

      Successive waves of the invaders pushed inland, creating fortified farming communities under petty chieftains along the fertile river valleys and on the edges of immense woodland, such as the Weald and the Forest of Dean, the great woods around London and what is now Stansted airport, the Chiltern plateau, and those in Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, the Lake District and Wiltshire, in much the same way as the Celts had done before them. Saxon farming communities had the same essential requirements from woodland; they built their houses and even their principal buildings from wood. They needed wood for basic fuel, fencing, for the salt works and mines, and as the population expanded farmland was extended at the expense of trees. Woodland was coppiced in the same way as it had been by previous generations to provide a self-replenishing supply of easily handled poles, with mature trees among the underwood for beams and planks.

      In the years after 1066 the woodlands provided a vital part of the whirlwind programme of castle building instigated by William the Conqueror, as he sought to suppress the populations of regional centres by creating a network of fortified power-bases. Over a period of twenty years, at least 1,000 wooden motte-and-bailey fortifications and 87 stone castles were built. Both the Crown and the Church sought to assert their authority over the populace by constructing many hundreds of imposing castles or magnificent abbeys – between 1130 and 1280 the Cistercians alone built 86. Construction on this scale required a phenomenal amount of trees, and buildings in general continued to be the single biggest use of timber for many centuries. Three-quarters of the building timber used was oak, the most common species of coppiced wood, with some ash, elm and aspen.

      The majority of buildings were made from large numbers of relatively small trees, about 30 centimetres in diameter and probably no more than 6 metres in length. There were a variety of reasons for this: woodland management was designed to provide a rapid turnover of self-sustaining materials, and a standard growing amongst underwood would reach about six metres before branches or the crown developed, providing a tree that was easy to fell, extract and transport and a trunk which did not require much carpentry and could be adzed into shape. Larger trees were expensive to move, difficult for early saws to cut through lengthwise, and were generally reserved for castles, cathedrals and great houses.

      All English wood was deciduous hardwood, and from the middle of the thirteenth century the very rich began to panel the interior of their houses with softwood boards imported from the Baltic. Known as deal, there are references as early as 1250 of deal boards for panelling in the accounts for the building of Windsor Castle and of Norwegian pine scaffolding in the early 1300s during the building of Ely Cathedral’s octagonal ‘Lantern Tower’. During the Tudor period, an increased demand for bigger timber led to Henry VIII passing a statute which required woods to be enclosed after cutting, to prevent regrowth being damaged by browsing animals, and thirty trees to be left in each hectare, to be grown into timber.

      TIMBER – NATURE’S MOST USEFUL GIFT

      There was, of course, an infinite number of uses for every part of each woodland species. Oak was by far the most abundant standard tree, although other species such as ash were occasionally allowed free growth. Every soil type and region had characteristic combinations of coppice species. These included hazel and ash on the Midland clays, beech and sessile oak on Western sandstone, and lime in central Lincolnshire. Hornbeam and sweet chestnut grew widely in the south-east, while local or minor underwood species included whitebeam, wild cherry, crab apple, maple, alder and elm. Some underwood species were particularly suited to specialised uses, and there was some selection in favour of these, but most coppice woodland included a mix of trees to serve a variety of local needs.

      COMMON OAK

      The common oak, although widely distributed over Europe, is regarded as a peculiarly English tree. It was for many centuries the principal woodland tree in England and is intimately bound up with the history of these islands. As timber, its particular and most valued qualities are its resilience, elasticity and strength, and oak has long been a symbol that reflects the hardiness of the British people. King Edward’s Chair, also sometimes known as ‘St Edward’s Chair’ or ‘The Coronation Chair’, is the throne on which British monarchs sit for their coronation. It was commissioned in 1296 by King Edward I to be carved in oak and designed to contain the Stone of Destiny, the coronation stone of Scotland, below the seat. (This was returned to Scotland in 1996, on the condition that it is sent down to England whenever there is a coronation.)

      In the mining areas of Britain coppiced oak was primarily cut for manufacturing charcoal, but there was also a huge demand for the hard, tight-grained, flexible timber in both house and ship-building, particularly by the navy during the Napoleonic Wars. A large ship of the line in Nelson’s navy, carrying between 70 and 100 guns with a ship’s company of over 1,000 officers and men, required timber from 3,500 standard oak trees. In 1805, at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar, the navy alone consisted of 128 ships of the line, 35 gun vessels, 145 frigates,