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

landowners were empowered to reclaim wood pasture and heath for agricultural purposes, regardless of the rights of the commoners or the Crown. In the ten years between 1779 and 1789, 4,000 hectares of Sherwood Forest were lost to enclosure and, in 1779, the larger part of Epping Forest. When Enfield Chase was also enclosed in 1779, a portion was allotted to the villagers of Enfield in compensation for the loss of their common rights, and even this was reduced to a measly ten hectares in 1803. The ancient Forest of Needwood in Staffordshire was enclosed in 1802, inspiring Anna Seward, otherwise known as the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, to write her poem ‘The Fall of Needwood Forest’ in 1808:

       When Poesy, the Child of Zeal, Who soothes each Pang, that Earth can feel, Beheld, atwounded Nature’scall, That Scene of Horror, Needwood’s Fall She said, in haste to yield Relief, And calm the Mighty Mother’s Grief:

       Nature! dear Parent! Power divine! Whose Joys and Griefs are truly mine! To you my sympathy devotes My cheerful, and my plaintive Notes:

       With Feelings not to be supprest, I view your lacerated Breast; This Waste of Ravages! where flood Your Sylvan Wealth! Tour graceful Wood I cannot from the rifled Earth Call intosudden, second Birth.

      Large parts of Windsor Forest were enclosed in 1817; in 1857 Wychwood Forest was enclosed, and within two years over 800 hectares had been converted to farmland. The Forest of Dean and the New Forest suffered from a different form of enclosure. In the Dean, 4,500 hectares were enclosed for planting in 1814, denying owners of common rights access to their historical grazings and causing extreme hardship to those whose livelihoods depended on them. The situation became nasty in 1831 when around 2,000 commoners started to tear down the enclosure and troops had to be summoned from the garrison in Doncaster to quell the riot. Resistance soon crumbled, and although their leader, Warren James, was transported to the harsh penal colony in Tasmania, the commoners’ action led to their rights being ratified under the Dean Forest Act in 1838.

      In Hampshire, thousands of acres of oaks and Scots pines were planted in the New Forest, from 1808 until 1877, in an attempt to develop commercial woodland. The New Forest Act 1877 put a stop to the damage that had previously been done to the forest and decreed that no more old natural woodland trees were to be felled, they regulated common rights, and reconstituted the Court of Verderers. The Court of Swainscote and Attachment of the New Forest, better known as the Verderers’ Court, meets roughly once a month at the Verderers’ Hall in the Queen’s House at Lyndhurst and is open to the public. The Court comprises the Official Verderer, a statutory appointment made by Her Majesty the Queen, who acts as chairman. Five elected Verderers represent the Commoners, and four appointed Verderers represent the Forestry Commission, DEFEA, the National Park Authority and Natural England. Five Agisters, who wear a livery on formal occasions of green hunting coat, breeches and boots, are employed by the Verderers; their role is to watch over the Forest and ensure, by regular inspection on foot, vehicle and horseback, that the owners of common grazing stock, and others, meet the requirements of the Verderers in respect of stock welfare and payment of making fees. In addition, they must inform the Verderers of any possible breaches of the Verderers’ byelaw; attend road accidents and other incidents involving commoners’ stock; deal with injured animals at the scene and humanely destroy them if necessary; arrange and manage the seasonal rounding up of ponies and cattle, and organise the construction and maintenance of stock pounds or layerages within their area.

      Delightfully, court proceedings start exactly as they have done for the last 800 years, with the senior Agister rising to his feet, holding his right hand aloft and bawling:’ Oyezf Oyezf Oyez! All manner of persons who have any presentment or matter or thing to do at this Court of Swaincote let him come forward and he shall be heard! God Save the it yeen!’ The Verderers of the Forest of Dean meet every forty days or so in the courtroom of the seventeenth-century Speech House. This beautiful building in the middle of the forest which was originally a hunting lodge and, later, the administrative centre for the forest is now a hotel. The Steward of the Forest and three Verderers who make up the court are appointed by the Crown, retain administrative functions and act as intermediaries between the commoners, the local public and the Forestry Commission – who manage the woodland.

      The impact of Royal Forests on Anglo-Norman society and their significant place in the history of Britain has created the false impression that these islands were covered in woodland from Cornwall to Caithness. In fact, although the Saxons probably increased the area of farmland as their population increased and managed the woodland fairly intensively near settlements, the landscape remained largely unchanged during their 600 years of occupation. In 1086, about 15 per cent of England was woodland managed as mixed coppice and standards of different ages or pollarded wood pasture, 65 per cent was farmland, and the remainder was mountain, moor, heath or fen. An aerial view of Britain in the eleventh century would have shown bare mountains above the tree line, especially in the north and in Wales. There were miles of scrubby sessile oaks and birch trees, sparsely wooded heaths and wood pasture, marshes and wetlands, and coastal fishing communities and wooded river valleys with clusters of settlements and farmsteads appeared where woodland had been cleared. Across the Midlands, there was a great band of coterminous woods, sufficient, so it was said, to enable a red squirrel to cross England from the Severn to the Wash without once setting foot on the ground.

      ‘IMPROVING’ BRITAIN’S NATIVE WOODLAND

      The idea of planting specifically for timber only occurred in the late seventeenth century and was largely influenced by the publication in 1664 of Sylva, A Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions by John Evelyn, the diarist, keen horticulturist and founder member of the Royal Society. Evelyn had been horrified by the wanton destruction of woodland during the Civil War and the mismanagement during the years of Cromwell’s Protectorate, when many Royalist landowners, such as the Reresbys of Thryberg, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, were forced to destroy extensive stands of hardwood to pay fines imposed by Cromwell. Evelyn believed, erroneously, that woodland in Britain was in terminal decline due in part to the depradations of the previous twenty years, but also from the demands of various industries, such as iron, house and ship building. A Discourse of Forest Trees was addressed primarily to the Lords of the Admiralty as a warning of impending timber shortages and advocated an immediate policy of woodland planting. It is surprising, considering his family fortune was based on charcoal and the manufacture of gunpowder, that Evelyn failed to recognize the historical evidence that industry had been responsible for sustaining our woodlands, rather than destroying them. Nor did he appear to appreciate that felling broadleaved trees does not kill them, and provided they are protected from browsing, areas of clear felled woodland will self-regenerate in a matter of years.

      EVELYN BELIEVED, ERRONEOUSLY, THAT WOODLAND IN BRITAIN WAS IN TERMINAL DECLINE DUE IN PART TO THE DEPRIVATIONS OF THE PREVIOUS TWENTY YEARS, BUT ALSO FROM THE DEMANDS OF VARIOUS INDUSTRIES, SUCH AS IRON, HOUSE AND SHIP BUILDING.

      Throughout history, nearly all clearance of woodland has been for agriculture and, up until the industrial revolution, industries relied on coppiced woodland for fuel. The great woodlands of the Weald had already been supplying fuel for the local iron industry for a thousand years before its heyday in the sixteenth century, when over fifty blast furnaces and sixty forges were churning out cannons for the Tudor wars, and could never have survived unless they had been managed as coppice. The same was true of the other mining areas, such as the Merthyr and Ebbw valleys in Wales or the Forest of Dean. It was in the agricultural areas such as East Anglia, the Midlands, the flatlands of north Humberside, the Vale of York or the coastal lowlands of Scotland where woodlands were almost completely destroyed. To quote Dr Rackham, ‘the survival of almost any large tract of woodland suggests that there has been an industry to protect it against the claims of farmers’. A Discourse of Forest Trees influenced many landowners,