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outside the law of the land. But under the Normans
Forest Laws superseded Anglo-Saxon common laws
and now rights to the forest became exclusive to the
king
and the new nobles. For the Normans
forest
was
a legal term and it might cover many thousands of
acres of land and not just the wooded parts. When an
area was designated forest, any villages, towns and
fields that lay within it were also subject to the strict
and often brutal Forest Laws with offences divided
into two categories: trespass against the
vert
(the
vegetation) and the
venison
(the game).
The laws of the
vert
applied to any land within the
forest boundaries, even land freely owned
denying
free men the right to utilise their land as they saw fit.
Trespasses against the
vert
included the enclosure of
a pasture or the erection of a building on forest lands
which was called
purpresture
and
assarting,
which
was the clearing of forest land for agriculture by
felling trees or clearing shrubs. The saying
"by hook
or by crook"
comes from this time when villagers
weren’t allowed to cut down trees but could take dead
wood or fallen timber if it could be cleared and pulled
out with a shepherd's crook or a weeding hook.
By the laws of
venison
people living in the forests
were forbidden to bear hunting weapons and
were banned although mastiffs were allowed as
watchdogs if they had their front claws removed to
prevent them from hunting game. Game animals
protected by law included the
nd
red
deer), the
nd
the wild boar
(extinct in the wild by the 13
th
century) and the
People whose villages and towns were now decreed
to be forest ( from “
foris”
Latin for outside) were
outside the common law could no longer take hare,
coney (rabbit), pheasant or partridge. Offenders
against Forest Law might have their hands cut off or
they might be blinded in both eyes. Later local people
were granted a variety of rights as commoners.
Pasture
was the right to pasture animals on the
common land,
piscary
was the right to fish,
turbury
to cut turf for fuel. The common of
marl
bestowed the
right to take sand and gravel,
pannage
was the right
to graze pigs in the autumn for acorns or beech mast
and
estover
was the right to cut and take firewood.
The Start Of Antipathy Towards The French?
Forest Laws caused much friction with the people and
could quite possibly be responsible, far more than the
more remote fact of invasion, for imprinting upon the
very soul of the Englishman an antipathy towards the
Frenchman that hasn’t ever really shifted. The harsh
rule of the Conqueror’s son and successor William
Rufus might well have been the motive for his death
in a “hunting accident” when he was hit by a stray
arrow. Ruthless attempts by King John to add to the
royal forests, an act known as afforestation, was one
of the reasons that the barons insisted on Magna Carta
in 1215. King John, French, bad. Robin of Sherwood,
English, good. Man or metaphor? Who knows?
Villagers hoped their land would be released from
Forest Law (disafforested) and declared a
purlieu
where their rights were restored. Here comes a great
sentence. Are you ready? Afforestation by the
Angevins led to perambulations in the 13
th
century
to fix boundaries. It makes the hairs stand up on the
back of my neck. In 1300 many, perhaps all, of the
forests were perambulated (the boundaries were
walked) and greatly reduced in their extent. King
after king tried to recover the
purlieus
created by this
Great Perambulation of 1300 and Forest officers
every now and again had a go at fining inhabitants of
the purlieus for forest offences leading to complaints
in Parliament. But nothing ever really changed.