Today only fragments of the great
forests that surrounded the Staffordshire Moorlands during the Middle Ages
remain. The Peak Forest Cannock and
Needwood survive but much shrunken by cultivation and encroachment by man. Sherwood,
of Robin Hood fame used to cover huge swathes of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire
and Yorkshire . It is much reduced now.
Local place names mark the
importance of woods in the landscape with Ashbourne, Oakamoor, Birchall and
Westwood marked on modern maps.
In the years after the Conqueror
the forests of the King would have stretched as far as the eyes could see. They
were protected so that the monarch could indulge their great passion of
hunting, and they were determined to protect their interest with punitive laws.
King John was famously forced to sign the Magna Carta but alongside the Great Charter
he was required to agree to the Forest Charter which enshrined the rights of
dwellers in the woods. Both documents were the foundations on which the social
structure of England
was founded. (The existence of the Forest Charter was used in 2010 by people
campaigning against the privatisation of the Forestry Commission)
The forests of the 13th
century were the relicts of the primeval woods of oak, beech, ask and hornbeam,
etc that covered the country. By that time game that lived in the forest was
protected and harsh punishments were meted out to any peasant who succumbed to
temptation. As time progressed the King and the aristocracy became more
desperate to protect a vanishing heritage when the woods were alive with much
game for the enjoyment of the monarch and his supporters.
There were growing pressures on the
landscape as people who lived at the fringes of the forest sought to take
advantage of it. Extra meat could be had if you were not caught by the King’s
representative, honey was for the taking, acorns could be collected to feed the
pigs and wood collected for burning on peasant fires. The needs of the common
people could often conflict with the law and the person responsible for
maintaining the estate, the Chief Forester.
The records of forest proceedings
are full of poaching stories such as the occasion when a group killed 3 deer in
the Rockingham Forest
“They cut off the head of the deer
and placed it with a spindle in its mouth that made it gape towards the Sun in
contempt of the King and the foresters”.
And sometimes more locally the
friction could lead to violence when in Christmas 1325 the Chief Forester of
Cannock William Le Wolf was murdered at Hopwas carrying out his duty by Roger
de Swynerton.
By the arrival of the Tudors much
of the forest had been surrended to the plough. Even today the woods of Anglo
Norman England shorn of their dense vegetation and turned into pasture, still
speak to the historian of ancient times, the isolated farms, the clumps of
trees here or there and the coppice surviving mid field proclaim the primordial
forest
