Forests and chases in Wales and the Welsh Marches: an exploration of their origins and characteristics

Abstract

Lords of forests and chases had exclusive rights to hunt and to preserve wild animals and vegetation across not only their own land, but also common land and property used by other people for all other purposes. As common-pool resource systems devoted primarily to non-economic ends, forests and chases are anathematised in narratives of the origins and progress of profit-seeking modernity and the democratic circumscription of arbitrary sovereign power. In Wales and the Marches they have been almost completely neglected and treated as synonymous with woodlands. Welsh law did not warrant exclusive hunting preserves for rulers, but Anglo-Norman invaders avidly created them. They were just as thick on the ground and as well-protected as in medieval England – indeed, perhaps more so and for longer, as hunting retained great symbolic significance for Welsh inhabitants and Anglo-Norman lords, and neither the Charter of the Forest, which enabled disafforestation, nor forest eyres, objection to which motivated it, applied to Wales and the Marches, where noble forest lords, forest officers and forest commoners had strong vested interests in their continuance into and through early-modern times. Much more research is needed to discover the number, extent and survival of these distinctive expressions of pre-modern attitudes, institutions and behaviours, and their contribution to the present landscape.