On the Evolution of a Forest Landscape

Abstract

The paper presents documentary evidence concerning the settlement and reclamation of Needwood Forest, Staffordshire. At first the heavy boulder clays of the plateau deterred Saxon settlers, who preferred the better drained, lighter soils along the banks of the Dove and Trent. A wild unsettled interior persisted for hunting. The hunting area diminished during the Norman-Medieval period as further settlement occupied the outer slopes. The shrinkage was offset by numerous deer parks which were enclosed by the Ferrers family. Clearance decreased towards the end of the fourteenth century when Needwood became a royal forest, and its laws were more strictly enforced than previously. The decay of the forest from 1485 onwards was characterized by increased removal of timber, disparking, inclosures, and the ineffectiveness of the Woodmote Court. By 1658 the forest had been further reduced to the plateau where it was fenced off. Game hunting was subordinated to cattle rearing. The commoners twice prevented attempts to sell Needwood in 1658 and 1683. Massive deforestation occurred and local people used the forest at will. After inclosure in 180o, the waste was replaced by an orderly landscape. Common rights were extinguished and much of the remaining woodland felled. Two landscapes are distinguishable: one in the fringes, preserving the Saxon and Medieval features; the other in the core, which has a typical post-enclosure pattern with no village settlement. A FOREST in the legal sense has been defined as an 'extensive waste land including both woodland and pasture circumscribed by defined metes and bounds within which the right of hunting was reserved exclusively to the King. This territory was subjected to special laws-forest laws-by local as well as central ministers'.1 Forest law was introduced from Normandy and areas governed by it were placed outside the Common Law of the rest of the country.2 The effect of this policy was to maintain the land in a wild state in order to provide a source of game and timber. Although some cultivation existed within royal forests, the expansion of the arable and the act of clearance were constrained by fines levied by forest courts, variously known as woodmotes, swainmotes and attachments. The net result of these legal measures maintained and perhaps helped to increase the area of waste and woodland, and it is estimated that, during the thirteenth century, when royal forests reached their maximum extent, they covered one-third of England.3 As well as the typical Norman-Medieval period, there are two other phases of relevance to forest development. The first is the Saxon and Saxon-Danish period, which was the precursor of the main period. The second was the post-Medieval period of gradual disafforestation. In the Saxon and Danish periods certain wild and unsettled areas of the country were reserved for hunting in much the same way as the later Medieval forests. They were basically the same in appearance and function and often occupied the same territory as their Norman-Medieval successors. The main difference was that they were not subjected to special forest law, designed to protect the game and timber. Disafforestation, the act of freeing from forest law, began in the late thirteenth century and proceeded at different rates in different forests. Ashdown, Sherwood, Kingswood and Enfield Chase were inclosed and disafforested by i653.4 Other forests, such as the New Forest, Forest of Dean and Epping Forest, persisted and still survive as shrunken remnants, while still others were disafforested slowly and were not inclosed until the late eighteenth