Sherwood and Sherwood Forest

Abstract

Sherwood forest in Nottinghamshire was one of several English royal forests named after particular woods, in this case a ‘shire-wood’. During the twelfth century what later became known as Sherwood forest was called ‘the forest of Nottingham’, and the change to its subsequent name resulted from a complex process that took place between the 1160s and the 1230s. The location and extent of the original ‘shire-wood’ is problematic. The significance of an isolated reference, in an Anglo-Saxon royal charter of 958, to a ‘shire-wood’ in north Nottinghamshire is uncertain. The recent identification, in a mid-thirteenthcentury charter, of a reference to a ‘wood called Sherwood’, lying east of Kirkby in Ashfield, indicates that the core of the by then established forest of Sherwood lay in the woodland in which the Augustinian priory of Newstead had been founded by Henry II.