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Sherwood Syndrome
In his thoughtful book
The Green Road into the
Trees: An Exploration of England,
published in 2012,
the explorer and travel writer Hugh Thomson followed
the drovers paths and ancient byways of the Icknield
Way from the Dorset Coast to the Wash. He offers his
own theory as to why we tend to cling to a romantic
history of our woodlands and forests.
“The idea that England 3,000 years ago was already
as suburban as the outskirts of Basildon has not been
absorbed into the popular consciousness. Nor will it
ever be readily, for we suffer from what might be
called Sherwood Syndrome: the need to believe that
much of England — most of England — was both
wild and wooded until modern history ‘began’ in 1066,
or indeed stayed so until much later; and that these
ancient forests were the repository of ‘a spirit of
England’, the Green Man, that could be summoned
at times when we needed to be reminded of our
national identity; where Robin Hoods of all subsequent
generations could escape, where the Druids gathered
their mistletoe from the trees, where the oak that built
our battleships came from.”
When The Romans Ran Out of Wood
Wood is power. Whole forests were felled to build the
temples and palaces of Babylon. The Phoenicians
sailed the ancient seas in ships built with the cedars of
Lebanon. By about the time that Bronze Age Britons
had halved our woodlands 3000 years ago, most of the
Ancient Middle East had lost its forests.
Chop Chop
The Bronze Age began in Britain around 2500 BC
when migrants who knew how to refine metals
arrived from Europe. At first these folk, known as
the Beaker People from the pottery beakers they
were buried with, made items from copper but
sometime around 2150 BC their smiths learned that
adding tin created a harder metal. This was bronze
and over the next 1000 years it replaced stone.
It’s a lot easier to chop down a tree with a metal axe
so although it’s not surprising to learn that our
Bronze Age ancestors chopped down more trees
than their Stone Age predecessors it is astonishing
to discover that they cleared half of all the primeval
woodlands in Britain. If you’ve ever gazed,
unmoved, upon the little cluster of Bronze Age axe
heads ubiquitous to local museums go and take a
look at them again. They changed everything. The
Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that
we are only just beginning to appreciate. Much of
England had been cleared as early as 1000 BC,
which is quite at odds with the popular belief that
our green and pleasant land was a sylvan paradise
until those nasty mill and factory and coal mine
owners ruined it for everyone.
Some woodland was deliberately kept and managed
for building materials, fuel and grazing but as the
Bronze Age gave way to 900 years of the Celtic Iron
Age already much of the English landscape was
made up of open land where farmsteads were
interspersed with small towns.