The Forest (60 page)

‘But Father,’ she had reminded him, ‘his family …’

‘An ancient family.’ The Lisles were indeed a family of some antiquity who had for a long time possessed lands on the Isle of Wight.

‘Yes, but his father …’ The whole county knew about John Lisle’s father. Inheriting a good estate, he had squandered both it and his reputation. His wife had left him; he had taken to drink; in the end, he had even been arrested for debt. ‘Isn’t there bad blood …?’

Bad blood: that expression so beloved of the landed classes. A notorious brigand or two gave a certain patina to the ancestral furniture. But you had to be careful. Bad blood meant danger, uncertainty, unsoundness, blighted harvests, diseased trees. The gentry, who were still partly farmers, had their feet on the ground. Breeding people, after all, was no different from breeding livestock. Bad blood will out. It had to be avoided.

But to her surprise, her father only smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now let me advise you on that.’ And giving her that look of his that announced, ‘I speak with a lifetime of experience as a lawyer,’ he proceeded: ‘When a man has a father who has lost his substance there are two things he can do. He can accept a lowly condition, or he can fight back and make his fortune.’

‘Isn’t that what younger sons are meant to do?’

‘Yes.’ A cloud crossed his face as he reflected that this was just what his own younger brother had failed to do. ‘But when a father has dishonoured his family as well then the case is even sharper. The son of such a man faces not only poverty but shame, ridicule. Every step he takes down the street is dogged by shadows. Some men hide. They seek a life of obscurity. But the bravest souls outface the world.
They hold their heads high; their ambition is not like a fire of hope, but a sword of steel. They seek fame twice: once for themselves and once to erase the shame of their fathers. That memory is always with them, like a thorn, driving them on.’ He paused and smiled. ‘John Lisle, I think, is such a one. He is a good man, an honest man. I’m sure he is kind. But he has that in him.’ He looked at her with affection. ‘When a father has an heiress as a daughter he looks, if he is wise, for a husband who will know how to use that fortune: a man of ambition.’

‘Not another heir, Father? The ambitious man, surely, might care only for her money.’

‘You must trust my judgement.’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is that most of the heirs of fine estates are either soft, or lazy, or both.’ And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking, Alicia.’ He sometimes called her that. ‘With your strong character I wouldn’t inflict you on some unsuspecting heir to a great estate. You’d destroy the poor boy entirely.’

‘I?’ She looked at him in genuine astonishment. ‘I have no thought of being a strong character, Father,’ she replied, which only caused him to smile at her the more fondly.

‘I know, my child. I know.’ He tapped his finger lightly on her arm. ‘Consider John Lisle, though. I only ask that. You will find him worthy of respect.’

When, two days later, Stephen Pride stopped at the cottage of Gabriel Furzey on the way to the green, he reckoned he was doing him a favour. ‘Shouldn’t you be going?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ said Gabriel, which, thought Pride, was typical.

If, in the three hundred years since they had quarrelled about a pony, the Prides and the Furzeys had remained in Oakley, it was for the very good reason that there were few more pleasant places to live. If they had had other quarrels
about Forest matters down the generations – as they surely must have done – these were buried and forgotten. The Prides, by and large, still thought the Furzeys a little slow and the Furzeys still considered the Prides a bit pleased with themselves; although whether, after centuries of intermarriage, these perceptions had any validity it would be hard to say. One thing, however, which Stephen Pride and anyone else could have agreed upon was that Gabriel Furzey was an obstinate man.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Pride and went on his way.

The reason for his visit to the green was that young Alice Albion was there.

If there was one thing that had changed scarcely at all in the New Forest since the days of the Conqueror it was the common rights of the forest folk. Given their smallholdings and the poverty of much of the soil, this continuity was natural: the exercise of common rights was still the only way in which the local economy could work.

There were chiefly four, by name. The right of Pasture – of turning out animals to graze in the king’s forest; of Turbary – an allowance of turves, cut for fuel; of Mast – the turning out of pigs in September to eat the green acorns; and of Estovers – the taking of underwood for fuel. These were the four; although there were also some customary rights to marl, for enriching your land, and of cutting bracken as bedding for livestock.

The system by which these ancient rights were allocated, like ancient common law, was often complex and they might attach to an individual cottage; but it had been the custom to consider them as belonging to each landowner, who would claim them on behalf of himself and his tenants. The estate under which both Stephen Pride and Gabriel Furzey came belonged to the Albions. And since it would all, one day, belong to her, it was Alice, that morning, whom her father had sent, together with his steward, to collect some important information.

As he came up, Pride saw that she was sitting in the shade at the edge of the green. They had provided a table and a bench for her. The steward was standing at her side. On the table a large sheet of parchment paper was spread. She sat very upright. She wore a green riding dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it. In colouring she took after her mother. Her fair hair had a reddish tint, her eyes were more grey than blue. He smiled, thinking she looked rather fetching. He had seen this Albion girl around the place ever since she was a child. He was only seven years her senior. When she was twelve, he remembered, she hadn’t been too proud to race him on her pony. She had spirit. The Forest people liked that.

‘Stephen Pride.’ She needed no prompting from the steward and gave him a bright look. ‘What shall I write down for you?’

It was the first time, as far as anybody knew, that a complete list of all the common rights had ever been written down. They had always existed. They were in people’s memories. Any dispute in the Swainmote, as the old Venderers’ Court was often called, could always be solved by reference to the local jury, advised by the representatives of the vills. So why would anyone want to write down all this mass of local information?

As Stephen Pride enumerated the commoning rights to which his smallholding was entitled, he knew the reason very well. ‘It is’, as he had remarked to his wife the day before, ‘for our sovereign lord, the cursed king.’ And as he looked young Alice Albion in the eye now, he knew equally well, although neither of them said it, that her opinion was just the same.

If the evidence of history is anything to go by it seems clear that members of the royal house of Stuart only make good monarchs if they have been properly broken in first.

King James had. His miserable years in Scotland, where
by tradition the knife was never far from any monarch’s throat, had taught him to be canny. Whatever he might believe about the divine right of kings, he never in practice pushed his English Parliament too far. He was also quite flexible. His dream was to act as a broker between the two religious camps, marrying his children to both Protestant and Catholic royal houses, and seeking toleration for both religions in England. It was a dream largely unrealized; Europe was not ready for toleration yet. But, for all his faults, he tried. His son Charles, however, had received no such apprenticeship and displayed the Stuart inflexibility at its worst.

Sometimes it is a very great mistake to give a large idea, even a good one, to a small mind. And the idea of the divine right of kings was a very bad idea indeed. If one strips away the duplicity with which he tried to accomplish his aims, there is something naive and almost childish about the lectures that Charles I used to give his subjects. Although not without talent – his eye for the arts was remarkable – this belief in his rights blinded his intelligence to even the simplest political realities. No English king, not even mighty Harry when he kicked the Pope out of his Church, had ever made such claims to divine authority. No ruler, not even the Conqueror himself, had thought you could ignore ancient law and custom. Charles wanted to rule absolutely, as the French king was starting to do; but that wasn’t the English way.

It had not been long, therefore, before King Charles and the English Parliament were at loggerheads. The Puritans suspected that he wanted to bring back Catholicism – after all, his French wife was Catholic. Merchants disliked his habit of raising forced loans. Members of Parliament were furious to be told that he considered them, in effect, nothing more than his servants. By 1629 Charles had dissolved Parliament and decided to rule without it if he could.

The only problem was, what was he to do for money?
Charles wasn’t desperate. As long as he didn’t get involved in any wars – that was always a huge expense – he could just about get by. There were customs and other dues, and the profits from the crown lands. But still he always needed more. One thing he did was sell titles. The new order of baronets was a nice little earner. And as he and his advisers looked about for other assets to exploit someone had suggested: ‘What about the royal forests?’

What were they good for? No one was quite sure. There were the deer, of course. The only time the royal court usually bothered about the deer was for a coronation or some other huge feast, when they provided a large supply of venison. There was timber. That needed more looking into. And there ought to be some income from the fines levied by the royal forest courts.

It was then that a clever official suggested: ‘Why not have a Forest Eyre?’

It was an ingenious suggestion because, once it had been explained to him, nothing could have been better calculated to appeal to King Charles. The Forest Eyre went back to Plantagenet times. Every so often – years might pass between these visitations – the king’s special justices would go down to inspect the whole system, correct any maladministration, clear up any outstanding cases and, you could be sure, levy some handsome fines. As far as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been an Eyre in generations. Old King Harry had held one a century ago. Since then, everyone had forgotten about them. It was just what King Charles loved: an ancient royal prerogative his naughty people had forgotten. In 1635, to everyone’s great annoyance, there had been an Eyre in the New Forest.

The results had been quite encouraging. The regular Forest court had been galvanized. Three huge thefts of timber – a thousand trees at a time – had come to light and elicited three stupendous fines of a thousand, two thousand and three thousand pounds. This was an enormous haul.
But it was not these great fines that had infuriated the Forest. It was the attack on the ordinary folk.

That summer of 1635 there had been no less than two hundred and sixty-eight prosecutions brought before the Forest court. The average had usually been about a dozen. The Forest had never seen anything like it. Every inch of land they had discreetly taken in the last generation, every cottage quietly erected, all were exposed, all fined. There was not a village or family in the entire Forest that hadn’t been caught. None of the fines were lenient; some were vicious. Labourers occupying illegal cottages were fined three pounds. You could buy a dozen sheep, or a couple of precious cows for that, when most smallholders had milk from only one. A yeoman was fined a hundred pounds for poaching. A few yards of ground taken for some beehives, a troublesome dog, some illegally grazed sheep – all resulted in abrupt fines. As always, when King Charles set out to assert himself, he was thorough.

Was he within his rights? Not a doubt of it. But with his typical lack of tact, the Stuart king had managed to find an entire population that was naturally well disposed towards him and alienate them at a single stroke.

When the political quarrels of the seventeenth century have finally died away – which as yet, in England, they have not – Charles Stuart will surely emerge on to history’s page, once and for all, neither as a villain nor a martyr, but as a very silly man.

And now every cottager’s right to his ancient common rights was to be listed. To Pride it seemed interference for its own sake. Alice had other ideas.

‘The word in London’, her father had told her the day before, ‘is that the king wants to make an inventory of the whole area. And do you know why? He wants to offer the New Forest and Sherwood Forest together, as security for a loan! Imagine it,’ he continued with a shake of the head, ‘the
whole Forest could be sold off to pay the king’s creditors. That’s what’s behind all this, in my opinion.’

When Pride had finished his brief account she thanked him pleasantly and then enquired: ‘Where’s Gabriel Furzey? Shouldn’t he be here?’

‘Probably,’ Pride answered truthfully.

‘Well.’ Alice might be only eighteen, but she knew she wasn’t standing any nonsense from Gabriel. ‘You tell him from me, if you please, that if he wants his rights recorded he’d better come now. Otherwise they won’t be.’

So, grinning quietly to himself, Pride went off and delivered the message.

When one looked at Gabriel Furzey and Stephen Pride, it was not hard to guess what the attitude of each might be to the inquiry. Pride – lean, keen-eyed – was every inch an independent inhabitant of the Forest. But he had his relationship with authority too. His ancestors might have grumbled about the existence of any outside order in the Forest, but natural intelligence and self-interest had led the Prides, for a long time now, into a calculated relationship with the powers that be. When the representatives of the vills attended the Forest courts there was sure to be a Pride or two among them. Occasionally one would even take a junior position in the Forest hierarchy – an under-forester, for instance, or one of the agisters who collected the fees. Here and there a Pride had graduated from the tenant into the yeoman class, owning land in his own name; and as often as not, when the local gentlemen chose some yeomen to sit with them on juries they’d be glad enough to choose a Pride. Their reason was very simple: these Prides were intelligent, and, even in a disagreement, men in authority know that it is always easier to deal with an intelligent man than a slow-witted one. A gentleman forester felt on firm ground if he said, ‘Pride thinks he can take care of that,’ or ‘Pride says it won’t work’.