![]() ![]() The five animals of the forest protected by law were given by Manwood as the hart and hind ( red deer), boar, hare and wolf. Offences in forest law were divided into two categories: trespass against the vert (the vegetation of the forest) and trespass against the venison (the game). In the year of his death, 1087, a poem, " The Rime of King William", inserted in the Peterborough Chronicle, expresses English indignation at the forest laws. This operated outside the common law, and served to protect game animals and their forest habitat from destruction. William the Conqueror, a great lover of hunting, established the system of forest law. Forest law Medieval forest scene, from the Livre de chasse (1387) The North Yorkshire moors, a sandstone plateau, had a number of Royal Forests. Upland moors too were chosen, such as Dartmoor and Exmoor in the South West, and the Peak Forest of Derbyshire. Marshlands in Lincolnshire were afforested. In the Scots Highlands, a "deer forest" generally has no trees at all. In Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey, woodlands were established on sandy, gravelly acid soils. Clay soils in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire formed another belt of woodlands. In the Midlands, the clay plain surrounding the River Severn was heavily wooded. In the South West of England, forests extended across the Upper Jurassic Clay Vale. Prosperous, well-farmed areas were not generally chosen to be afforested if they were, they tended to lose their status fairly rapidly. The areas that became royal forests were already relatively wild and sparsely populated, and can be related to specific geographic features that made them harder to work as farmland. This could foster resentment as the local inhabitants were then restricted in the use of land they had previously relied upon for their livelihoods however, common rights were not extinguished, but merely curtailed. In addition, when an area was initially designated forest, any villages, towns and fields that lay within it were also subject to forest law. Royal forests usually included large areas of heath, grassland and wetland – anywhere that supported deer and other game. During the Middle Ages, the practice of reserving areas of land for the sole use of the aristocracy was common throughout Europe. Forest law prescribed harsh punishment for anyone who committed any of a range of offences within the forests by the mid-17th century, enforcement of this law had died out, but many of England's woodlands still bore the title "Royal Forest". The extent and intensity of hardship and of depopulation have been exaggerated", H. Īfforestation, in particular the creation of the New Forest, figured large in the folk history of the " Norman yoke", which magnified what was already a grave social ill: "the picture of prosperous settlements disrupted, houses burned, peasants evicted, all to serve the pleasure of the foreign tyrant, is a familiar element in the English national story . On his accession Henry II declared all of Huntingdonshire to be a royal forest. ![]() At one stage in the 12th century, all of Essex was afforested. The concept was introduced by the Normans to England in the 11th century, and at the height of this practice in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, fully one-third of the land area of Southern England was designated as royal forest. Forests were designed as hunting areas reserved for the monarch or (by invitation) the aristocracy. The law was designed to protect the " venison and the vert", the former, "noble" animals of the chase – notably red and fallow deer, the roe deer, wild boar – and the latter the greenery that sustained them. However, under the Norman kings (after 1066), by royal prerogative forest law was widely applied. Historians find no evidence of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs (c. In Anglo-Saxon England, though the kings were great huntsmen, they never set aside areas declared to be "outside" (Latin foris) the law of the land. There are also differing and contextual interpretations in Continental Europe derived from the Carolingian and Merovingian legal systems. land legally set aside for specific purposes such as royal hunting – with less emphasis on its composition. The term forest in the ordinary modern understanding refers to an area of wooded land however, the original medieval sense was closer to the modern idea of a "preserve" – i.e. Royal forests do not necessarily include woodlandĪ royal forest, occasionally known as a kingswood ( Latin: silva regis), is an area of land with different definitions in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. ![]()
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