Forest fences: enclosures in a pre-enclosure landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe word ‘fence’ is used here generically to denote any structure created to prevent or impede movement across the countryside. They ought to have been absent from forests, where obstructions to the free passage of deer and hunters were forbidden by forest law, which in principle, therefore, preserved open countryside. The patchwork of settlements and enclosed private fields of the characteristic English landscape could not emerge until disafforestation got rid of forest law. However, hunting required fences, and so did the preservation and management of deer so that they were available to be hunted. Growing crops abutting forests could be fenced from deer, and the statutory protection of common rights and coppices in forests required the careful regulation of areas available for fuel gathering, domestic animal grazing and wood production: whilst deer were allowed almost complete freedom of movement inside forests, commoners’ animals were not; some areas were temporarily closed even to deer; some were open to deer but not commoners’ animals, whilst others were accessible to both, but only at particular times. Far from being ‘wildscapes’, forests were common-pool resource systems where the exercise of different sets of rights over the same area of land by different people required complex systems of fencing. Some were unique to forests, and generally they differed from fences where enclosure allowed the management of land for private profit by individual owners with sole rights over its use.