From the Forest (10 page)

One of the symbols of these newly conceived royal rights was the claim that the monarch owned all wild animals – they belonged to the Crown regardless of whose land they happened to be on at any given moment, and therefore a king had a unique right to hunt them. (When the Normans arrived, this principally meant deer and wild boar, but it could include hare and other species.) Moreover, if the King had a particular right to hunt, he therefore had a right to places to keep ‘his’ deer and to protect them from being hunted by other people. William set about ‘afforesting’ – declaring by proclamation that the monarch, to the exclusion of everyone else, had the sole right to hunt over any piece of ground he fancied. Any Royal Forest so declared was no longer administered under the common law or the traditional local administration, but fell under Forest Law. Prior to the Norman Conquest, woodland – particularly wood pasture – in England was extensively used for grazing stock, for fuel, for building materials, and for extending arable land by grubbing out trees and shrubs and putting the land to the plough. Declaring a piece of land to be Royal Forest did not mean that it was
owned
by the Crown, but that its management fell under the Forest Law designed primarily to protect the game. These laws overrode various older rights under common law, for example, the rather splendidly named rights of purpresture (fencing off of any part of the forest for grazing or building on it), assarting (clearing forest land and felling trees for agriculture), pannage (letting pigs forage), agisment (pasturing other stock), estover (taking firewood) and turbary (cutting peat or other turfs). The Forest Law also included limitations on harvesting other forest products, on carrying weapons and on keeping dogs. If you lived within the New Forest, for example, you were allowed to keep a mastiff as a guard dog, but had to have its claws removed, so that it could not hunt deer. In actual fact, most of the old rights continued to be exercised, but their management was removed from local control and vested in the King’s Foresters.

(Just to confuse things further, land could become Royal Forest without being a forest in the common sense of the word. In this new legal sense, ‘forest’ meant a place where there was something to hunt, rather than a place where there were lots of trees. Hare, for example, are not forest animals, but they are beasts of the chase, and for the purpose of coursing them, tracks of open grass land could be afforested. The noble sport of falconry or hawking requires open land too – so the King could afforest appropriate areas for that as well; in 1066, large areas of what became the New Forest were not wooded at all.)

All the Plantagenet kings used their rights not just to hunt but to confer privileges and gifts of meat and wood on their faithful retainers and to furnish indecently large banquets. William the Conqueror loved hunting. He afforested
ubicumque eam habere vouit
, ‘everywhere he felt like it’, and he, and his immediate heirs, felt like it eventually in about a third of southern England. The list of Royal Forests goes on and on – from Allerdale in Cumbria to Exmoor, from Shropshire to Kent, but especially in the central shires (though, curiously, not in the North-East beyond York), the Plantagenets afforested over eighty tracts of land, some of them very large. It is important to remember just how much of the pathetic acreage of ancient woodland that remains – especially in England – was protected from being grubbed out (having the trees cut down and their roots extracted, which was necessary prior to ploughing) because it had been afforested by the Crown. Most of the forests we know by name were Royal Forests: Sherwood and Epping and Bolsover and Dean and Woodstock and Hatfield and Windsor and, of course, the New Forest.

This enthusiasm for hunting had rich symbolic meaning for the new status of the King, but it also seems to have been a personal passion of William the Conqueror, not merely an assertion of his power. William had fallow deer introduced into England (before this, there were only the native red deer and roe deer), and probably also pheasants. And after his death in 1087, his zeal was recorded bitterly in the
Peterborough Chronicle
:

He loved greediness very much;
He set up many deer preserves and also enacted laws
That whoever killed a hart or hind
Should be blinded . . .

Oliver Rackham argues that blinding as described here – and castrating, another punishment for infringing the Forest Law – were actually never applied; and, moreover, only the nobles were ever charged with such offences and were punished with fines, which was more useful to the English Crown, which was relatively impoverished in comparison with its European peers. But from the point of view of the narrative imagination and the evolution of popular culture, the belief that such punishments existed where they had not existed before the arrival of the Normans was to prove significant.

The Norman Conquest heralded a massive social change in England, at the expense of the old Anglo-Saxon population. This can still be seen in contemporary English language: the words for domestic animals while alive remain Anglo-Saxon in derivation – cow, pig, sheep; but when meat arrives on the table it becomes French – beef (
boeuf
), pork (
porc
), mutton (
mouton
). It is not hard to work out who was eating meat, a strong indicator of prosperity in Europe even now, and who was doing the agricultural labour, then – and still – one of the steadiest indicators of low pay. As a corollary, it is interesting to see that the live animal remains the insult word – stupid cow, greedy pig and silly sheep.

Forest Law was imposed from above. It was also new, replacing older customs, and it emanated directly from the foreign conqueror; it was different from the old well-known and well-understood laws which, however severe, had the comfortable force of tradition behind them. Not surprisingly, then, afforestation caused bitter anger, at all levels of society. A limitation on the right to afforest was one of the causes addressed by the noblemen who drew up Magna Carta in 1215, devoting four clauses of the document to the matter, including demands that ‘All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly’; and ‘All evil customs relating to forests . . . are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.’

The New Forest, which William the Conqueror afforested in 1079, was created out of a wide swathe of what is now Hampshire – then, as it still is, a rich mixture of ancient woodland, open heath and coast. In order to establish good hunting grounds, the residents were evicted and communities destroyed, although the 36 parishes of tradition must be an exaggeration – the soil was always poor and infertile here, so the land can never have supported such a thriving agricultural population.

There was deep resentment. As is common with folklore, this sense of grievance grew until, in the seventeenth century, Richard Blome recorded:

William the Conqueror (for the making of the said Forest a harbour for Wild-beasts for his Game) caused 36 Parish Churches, with all the Houses thereto belonging, to be pulled down, and the poor Inhabitants left succourless of house or home. But this wicked act did not long go unpunished, for his Sons felt the smart thereof; Richard being blasted with a pestilent Air; Rufus shot through with an Arrow; and Henry his Grand-child, by Robert his eldest son, as he pursued his Game, was hanged among the boughs, and so dyed.

William Rufus’s death remains mysterious – an unsolved assassination or an unfortunate accident. It is the sort of event that feels as though it belonged more to a fairy story or legend than to history.

Throughout Europe this centralising power of the monarchy cut deep into rural life. The response of the ‘old’ pre-conquest landed class, if they did not join the new order and reap its rewards, was armed resistance. In England, Hereward the Wake is perhaps the most famous rebel. In alliance with some highly dubious Viking invaders, he sacked Peterborough Abbey and then hid out in the Fens, waging a kind of guerrilla warfare until he was defeated on the Isle of Ely in 1071. The North-East proved particularly hard to subdue (as usual), the landed classes there having a long history of independence and of claiming special freedoms, particularly from taxation, for themselves, as ‘the patrimony of St Cuthbert’. The huge, stern cathedral in Durham, one of the great works of Norman architecture and designed to house the shrine of the saint, was founded in 1093 to ‘buy off’ the recalcitrant northern earls.

These were conservative rebellions – they were against ‘new’ laws and the new style of monarchy. They were not ‘revolutions’, or radical struggles for rights and privileges for those who had never had them, they were insurrections against change. They were the resistance of those who had been doing well out of the old system and wished it to continue.

From this perspective, Forest Law did something else, something inverted and strange. As well as preserving wildwood and forest from the onslaught of agriculture, Forest Law created a uniquely useable space where the illegal could become the heroic. Resisting Forest Law was a crime not against one’s neighbours but against an invisible centralised government; not against the common traditions that, however unwelcome, bound communities together, but against a distant authority, and one whose legitimacy could be questioned under the rules of the old dispensation. The forest was thus not only one of the things that these malcontents were contesting, it also became the place into which they could escape in order to contest it at all.

Efficient slave cultures need open land: it has to be difficult to run away. Egypt, for example, is perfect for this purpose – the chances of disappearing off into the desert are slim: escapees can be spotted from miles away, and if the owners do not catch them, the desert will probably kill them. Forests are precisely the opposite – they are very good places to hide. Slip away between the trees, lurk in the greenwood, vanish into the thickets of wild wood: step outside the laws that bind you to the present and you become the Out Law – the free hero of romance and folk tale.

The most famous of these outlaws is Robin Hood, who probably never existed at all – legend, anecdote and fantasy create composite characters who come to represent a whole idea. But such characters, the heroes of folk legend, are usually based on some sort of reality, and there is no reason to think that Robin Hood is an exception. In this sense, these legends are very different from fairy stories and more related to literary romance. The developed story of Robin Hood epitomises all the arguments here.
⁵
He was a landholder, a minor nobleman, Robin of Locksley Hall, and in some accounts even the Earl of Huntingdon. He was treated unjustly by ‘bad’ King John and his wicked place-man the Sherriff of Nottingham while the ‘good’ king, Richard the Lionheart, was off fighting the crusade, so he fled into the forest and became an outlaw, but an outlaw seeking personal restitution, not social change. Meanwhile, he lived free, he ‘robbed from the rich to give to the poor’, he supported the oppressed and was true to the ‘real’ king. It was not the law, but the abuse of the law that he resisted. From early on, accounts of Robin Hood present him as ‘merry’ and courteous – with a particular respect for women – and as an excellent archer, but also as a ‘natural leader’ (officer class) who inspired to-die-for (often literally) loyalty from his men, who were all his social inferiors; these accounts also present a romantic and sunny forest, where Maid Marion can be treated like a princess and where excellent dinner parties can be thrown for friendly visitors.

This sense of the forest as both the place of oppression and the place to avoid or punish oppression goes very deep and still remains strangely resonant. Running away, camping out and living off the land have all kept their romantic heroism, even as children are more ‘cabin’d, cribbed and confined’
⁶
than they have ever been before.

The admiration for the noble and somehow free outlaw has left a strange shadow on our consciousness: poaching is treated as different from other forms of theft. At a cultural level, one great and continuing myth is that ‘natural products’ are free and should be freely available to everyone with the energy and wit to go and find them:
⁷
‘scrumping’ apples may be ‘naughty’, but it isn’t bad, while stealing fruit from a shop is criminal. This extends to poaching game as well. The contradiction is made explicit in
Tom Brown’s School Days
, of all unexpected places. Our hero and his friends have spent a day in the woods, climbing trees and collecting birds’ eggs (this shows they are good, healthy, ‘manly’ types). On the way home they fall foul of a farmer who accuses them of stealing his hens – although they are in fact innocent on this occasion. A helpful prefect, Holmes, ‘who was one of the best boys in the school’, arrives by chance on the scene and, in an extremely high-handed manner, liberates them from rustic arrest. However, once away from the menial farmer’s impertinent attempts to protect his own property, Homes goes on to lecture them:

Knocking over other people’s chickens and running off with them is stealing. It’s a nasty word but that’s the plain English of it. If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop you wouldn’t take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith’s basket; but there’s no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree, and the same articles in a shop. I wish our morals were sounder in such matters.
⁸

But it does no good – Tom and his companions are briefly chastened, but go back to poaching and bird theft, apparently with the amused tolerance of their usually highly moralistic creator. Regardless of the law, in a different, imagined parallel world the outlaw-in-the-forest has imbued the poacher with a romantic freedom, even a sort of virtue.
⁹
Sneaking off into the forest and living by your wits permeates literature. In
John McNab
,
¹⁰
John Buchan has members of the Cabinet poaching, to the ultimate amusement and admiration of the land owners (and also, therefore, in the twentieth century, the deer and salmon owners) themselves. It is one of the mainstays of children’s adventure stories: from
Children of the New Forest
to Enid’s Blyton’s
Famous Five
, poaching is presented as a noble sport and a mark of desirable independence. BB in
Brendon Chase
and Roald Dahl in
Danny, the Champion of the World
make poaching an heroic or at least an endearing act, in a way that ‘stealing’ never is. The young Charles Stewart (the future Charles II), hiding up an oak tree with a price on his head, suddenly stops being a pampered tyrant and becomes a loveable hero: he has escaped into the forest and become an outlaw. The strange wave of popular support that the thuggish Raoul Moat attracted in 2010, despite being a murderer (and blinding policemen), feels to me as though it was related to the fact that he ran off and hid from the law in the woods.