CHAPTER 7
All forests which have been afforested in our time shall be disafforested at once.
Magna Carta, Clause 47
During King John’s lifetime nearly a third of England was forest. Only three counties, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent contained none. It was possible to travel from the Wash to the Thames at Oxford, and from Windsor to the Hampshire coast without once leaving the forest. The whole of Essex was forest. But the fact that the whole county – towns, villages, farms, the lot – was so designated means, of course, that at that time the word ‘forest’ meant something quite different from what it does now. Some forest then we would recognise as such, the Forest of Dean, for example, or Sherwood Forest. Knaresborough Forest was described as ‘a vast and terrifying solitude’. Such places were the refuges of outlaws – the ‘Greenwood’ of Robin Hood – and the homes of hermits. Here too were the last retreats of animals that were gradually being hunted to extinction, such as the wild boar and the wolf. And there were some tracts of forest, in this sense of the word, in Essex. No fewer than twenty-five wild boars and twelve feral cattle were recorded as having been taken in the county between 1198 and 1207. In law the wild boar was reserved for the king, but the wolf was regarded as vermin. King John offered five shillings for a wolf’s head as an incentive to engage in the life and death struggle which the historian Robert Bartlett describes as ‘the fight between human beings and wolves, England’s fiercest and second fiercest mammals’.
But much of the forest was ordinary inhabited countryside. By declaring an area of land to be forest, the king created a royal monopoly over the management and distribution of resources previously enjoyed by local lords and tenant farmers. This process had started with the Norman Conquest. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William the Conqueror ‘set up great game-reserves and he laid down laws for them. Whosoever killed hart or hind was to be blinded. He forbade hunting the harts and the boars. He loved stags so very much, as though he were their father.’ Condemning human beings to death or mutilation for the offence of killing wild animals seemed appalling to most thinking people, but ever since the Norman Conquest the kings of England had gained a reputation for tyrannical behaviour and nowhere more so than in the measures they took to protect their forests. William of Newburgh criticised Henry I for punishing poaching as severely as homicide. But in the Assize of Woodstock, a royal ordinance issued at Woodstock, one of his favourite hunting lodges, Henry I’s grandson, Henry II, announced that in future forest offences would be punished not just by fines ‘but by full justice as exacted by my grandfather’. The Assize of Forest, promulgated on Richard I’s authority in 1198, set the penalty for killing deer as removal of the offender’s eyes and testicles. According to the author of the Histoire des ducs de Normandie, in John’s reign the deer felt so safe that when approached they merely ambled gently away. The records of forest courts suggest that in fact kings were much more interested in taking their subjects’ money than their lives or body-parts. So lucrative, indeed, were the profits of forest justice that later kings continued William I’s practice of declaring large tracts of land as forest. Henry II did this on a vast scale and by the end of his reign, 1189, the royal forest had reached its maximum extent.
A forest administration was established under a Chief Forester and his deputies. There were the foresters and verderers, officers responsible for policing the forest and attending forest courts; there were the regarders, who made inspections of the forest. All were supervised by the justices of the forest, who were sent round the country on ‘forest eyres’ to try offenders against forest law. Hunting without permission was forbidden. Dogs kept in the forest were ‘lawed’: three claws were cut off the fore paw so that they could not chase game. Clearing and cultivating land in the forest could be done only with permission – particularly exasperating in an age of rising population. A perpetual rent had to be paid to the crown for newly cultivated land. When one woman had an unauthorised ditch dug around her own land, it was confiscated, and it cost her a hundred marks to buy it back. (A mark was worth two-thirds of a pound, i.e., 13s 4d, or about 67p.) The right of local farmers to pasture their animals in the forest was strictly controlled and could be withdrawn at will. When the Cistercians offended King John he ordered his foresters to keep out their flocks and herds. In 1200 twelve Cistercian abbots prostrated themselves at the king’s feet, begging him to allow their animals back in.
A landowner could chop down a tree so long as it was for his own use, and not for sale, but even then he had to be careful not to overstep the mark. According to Henry II’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel, ‘If a man standing on the stump of an oak or other tree, can see five other trees cut down around him, that is regarded as “waste”. Such an offence, even in a man’s own woods, is considered so serious that even an officer of the Exchequer cannot be excused but will have to pay a fine proportionate to his means.’ If an offence occurred and no offender could be identified and prosecuted, a whole community might find itself in trouble and forced to pay a fine. Whenever a king was in need of cash, he sent round another forest commission. In 1175 Henry II raised over £12,000 by this means alone – and that at a time when the total royal revenue audited by the English Exchequer rarely exceeded £20,000 a year. Forest officials were vilified, and it was taken for granted, apparently even by Henry II himself, that his Chief Forester, Alan de Neville, would go to hell. Lesser forest officials were also unpopular – but would themselves be in trouble if they did not do their job to the satisfaction of the justices of the forest. Even according to Richard FitzNigel, in forest justice it was not possible to say that something was truly ‘just’, but only that it was ‘just according to the law of the forest’. Clearly this kind of justice was not thought of as just at all. When Henry II died, his widow, Eleanor of Aquitaine, ordered that everyone held in prison for a forest offence was to be freed at once, and that everyone outlawed for forest offences was pardoned.
Richard I found other ways of making money out of the forest. In 1190 he ‘disafforested’ – declared no longer forest – ‘that part of Bedfordshire that Henry I afforested’ in return for £200. John took on this scheme and went even further. In 1204 he agreed to disafforest the whole of Cornwall for 2200 marks and the county of Devon for 5000 marks; and in 1207 Surrey for 500 marks. This could only have happened because people in those counties raised funds and petitioned for something they regarded as being of benefit to them all; such action helped to create county communities and was of great importance in paving the way for Magna Carta. It gave people experience of co-operative political action, of demanding reform and being prepared to pay for it. The Crown accepted that the extent of the forest could be a matter for negotiation – and this too would be a feature of Magna Carta. But both Richard and John continued to profit from the forests and forest eyres in the old ways. Indeed they and their foresters could not resist what looked like sharp practice. People who had paid to have their district disafforested could not have been happy with the order that those who lived outside the forest, but within two leagues of it, should none the less be required, on pain of fine, to attend forest courts. In Magna Carta Clause 44 John had to acquiesce in the ending of this practice.
At Runnymede in 1215 the baronial reformers demanded that forests should be taken back to the state they were in at the accession of Henry II together with the abolition of what they called the ‘evil customs of forests and warrens’. This was a radical demand for the partial destruction of the royal forest, and for control of what remained. The iniquities of the royal forest system united rich and poor alike in opposition to the Crown. But even at Runnymede John was not prepared to concede so much. In Clause 47 of Magna Carta he agreed that all forests added during his reign were to be disafforested. But that was to give very little ground. It had been his father who had made the massive additions. Evidently the Magna Carta negotiations had involved some hard bargaining about the extent of the forest.
After John’s death, a council governed the realm on behalf of the nine-year-old Henry III. It was largely composed of men who had been loyal to John – but on the subject of the forest they shared the views of those who had taken up arms against him. In 1217 they issued a charter dealing exclusively with the matter of the forest. In this charter they made a series of substantial concessions. All forests added by Henry II, Richard and John were disafforested; every freeman was to have the right to develop his own land within the forest so long as this did not cause damage to a neighbour; in future no man was to lose life or limb for taking the king’s venison.
This last promise takes us straight into the world of Robin Hood, the outlaw hero who, in the words of the earliest surviving ballad, ‘A Gest of Robyn Hode’:
‘alway slewe the kynges dere
and welt them at his wyll’
meaning that he did just as he liked with them. And what he liked was to set them before visitors, willing and unwilling, as ‘fat vension’, washed down with good red wine and fine brown ale. Sherwood Forest was already known as a haunt of robbers and poachers. When King John appointed Ralph FitzStephen to the forestership of Sherwood, he granted him, as one of the perks of the job, permission to keep for himself the chattels of all robbers and poachers taken within the forest bounds.
It was not, however, until the sixteenth century that a historian, John Mair, first expressed the opinion that the celebrated Robin Hood and Little John lived during the period of King Richard’s absence on crusade and John’s bid to usurp the throne. The earliest known ballads of Robin Hood place him in the reign of a King Edward. Whenever he lived – if he ever did – the ballads, by placing Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the ‘Greenwood’, create a world of sylvan liberty, of freedom from the oppression of corrupt officials and unjust laws. Yet nowhere was the contrast between tyranny and freedom sharper and more keenly felt than in the forest. In the imaginary world of the ballads the king himself was always portrayed in a good light. He goes into Sherwood in disguise and falls in with the outlaws. When, eventually, Robin recognises him, he kneels before him, and the king sets everything right. In the real world, the king fought hard to preserve intact the arbitrary power of forest law.
No one took greater pleasure in the freedom of the ‘real’ forest than the tyrant of forest law. In The Dialogue of the Exchequer, an earnest administrative handbook explaining the workings of the government’s financial system, Richard FitzNigel wrote: ‘It is in the forests that kings can forget for a while the nerve-racking stress of the court and breathe instead the pure air of freedom.’ But these were pleasures and freedoms appreciated by many. The ballad ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ opens:
In summer when the woods are bright
And leaves are large and long
It is full merry in fair forest
To hear the birds in song.
In a passage describing a hunt setting out on a winter’s morning, the great medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight conveys something of that same enjoyment of the open air.
Wonderfully fair was the forest-land, for the frost remained
And the rising sun shone ruddily on the ragged clouds,
In its beauty brushing their blackness off the heavens.
The huntsmen uncoupled the hounds by a forest,
And the rocks resounded with their ringing horns.
Lords and even gentry possessed their own warrens, parks for small game such as hare and rabbit – the latter a recent immigrant, having arrived in southern England from the continent. They also had deer parks, enclosed within a combination of ditch, bank and fence, hedge or wall which allowed deer to jump into the park but not out of it. In 1215 there might have been as many as three thousand parks in the country. Lords were often granted the right of ‘free warren’, that is to say the exclusive licence to kill the lesser game on their own estates; the lesser game meant foxes, wild cats, otter, badger, squirrel and roe deer as well as hares and rabbits. But no one except the king, his guests and his foresters were allowed to touch fallow or red deer, or wild boar. Forest law was designed as much to reserve the pure air of freedom for the exclusive use of the king and his friends as it was to fill the royal coffers.
Not all nobles and kings loved hunting. John’s brother Richard I had little time for it, and John’s son, Henry III, little taste for it. Even so, Henry III still maintained, as did all kings, a large hunting establishment for the supply of meat to his household. For Christmas 1251 Henry III ordered his huntsmen to send to York 430 red deer, 200 fallow deer, 200 roe deer, 200 wild swine from the Forest of Dean, 1300 hares, 395 swans, 115 cranes – and much smaller game besides. John’s father, Henry II, had been a passionate huntsman, off at the crack of dawn for a day on horseback. A cynical courtier, Walter Map, reckoned that Henry was afraid of getting fat. (He also alleged that Henry’s judges encouraged him to go hunting so that, unchecked by the king, they could get on with the business of fleecing litigants.) John, too, was addicted to the pursuit. On 6 March 1204 he gave orders that wild animals should be trapped in the New Forest and sent to Normandy with his horses, dogs and falcons so that when he got there he could be sure of good hunting. The intended purpose of his trip was to drive out invading armies, but evidently that did not mean, so far as he was concerned, that he would be giving up his hunting.
The wealthy kept packs of hunting hounds, as well as hawks and falcons. They hunted deer either on horseback with hounds, which pursued the quarry to its death, or had game driven into enclosures known as ‘hayes’ or ‘deer hedges’, and then used bow and arrow to bring them down. Hunting arrows had triangular heads with long, heavy barbs, designed to cut through muscle and tissue, wounding and fatally weakening even a powerful stag. The bloody excitement of the kill comes across powerfully in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
Lo! The shimmering of the shafts as they were shot from bows!
An arrow flew forth at every forest turning,
The broad head biting on the brown flank.
They screamed as the blood streamed out, sank dead on the sward,
Always harried by hounds hard on their heels,
And the hurrying hunters’ high horn notes.
Hunting wild boar was less one-sided, though it was commonly the hounds, not the huntsmen, who lost their lives. A confrontation between Richard I and ‘a very fierce wild boar armed with very long tusks’, as described by the chronicler Richard, prior of Holy Trinity, London, makes it clear that training in handling weapons and horsemanship was among the uses of hunting.
‘At the king’s shout, it retreated a little then turned to face its pursuer. Foaming at the tusks, with its raised hairs bristling and ears erect, it worked itself up into a fury. The king shouted, but it did not move. It held its ground, spinning round to face the admiring king as he rode around it. The king attacked, thrusting a lance into it as though it were a hunting spear. The lance snapped and the boar, maddened by the wound, made a powerful charge. The king, having virtually no space or time to manoeuvre, put spurs to his horse and it jumped across the boar’s charge so that only its rear trappings were hit. They attacked each other again. As the boar charged, the king cut into the back of its neck with his sword. He then spun his horse round again, and cut the boar’s throat.
Hunting, whether with dogs or birds, had long been regarded as a pursuit in which the practitioners could demonstrate great skill and learning. For King Alfred the Great, the art of hunting came second only to the art of government. King John’s son-in-law, the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, was so dedicated to falcons and falconry that he wrote a Latin treatise on the subject, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, On the Art of Hunting with Birds. In this he claimed that falconry was nobler even than other forms of hunting because of the greater difficulties encountered and skills required if the birds were to be cared for, handled and trained to return to the falconer’s wrist.
According to Frederick, the taming of a newly caught falcon began with it being carried around for twenty-four hours without feeding it until it was exhausted. Most kings and aristocrats employed professional falconers to train and take charge of their birds. Henry II, for example, bought some property in Winchester and had it converted into mews with rooms for the falconers. The highest prices were paid for birds imported from Norway, Ireland and Scotland. All experts agreed that birds hatched in captivity were nowhere near as good as those born in the wild and trained to hunt by their parents. John was a keen falconer. He regularly went hunting on Sundays and saints’ days and then gave alms to the poor, the wealthy man’s comfortable – and useful – penance. On one occasion he went hawking on the Feast of Innocents, 28 December, and paid penance at the rate of feeding fifty poor people for each crane his birds brought down; on that day he did penance for seven cranes. He cared, too, about the feeding of his birds of prey, ordering that his favourite falcon, Gibbun, was to be ‘well fed with plump goats and good hens, with hare once a week’.
King Henry I was so expert a hunter that he was said to be able to tell the number of tips on a stag’s antlers by examining its hoofprint. According to John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket’s intellectual friend who became bishop of Chartres, the science of hunting was the only science the aristocracy knew. It was a science with its own laws, ‘the rules of the chase’, and with its own fashionably fluctuating terminology. We get a flavour of this in the early thirteenth-century poem Tristan. The hero was still just a precocious boy when he interrupted a huntsman on the point of carving up a newly killed hart:
‘How now, master, what is this? In God’s name stop! What are you at! Whoever saw a hart broken up in this fashion?’
The huntsman fell back a pace. ‘What do you want me to do with it then, boy?’
‘In my land they excoriate a hart’.
‘Dear boy, what is “excoriate”? I have never heard the word, and unless you show me I shan’t have the slightest idea what it means.’
Tristan proceeded to demonstrate his mastery of the art of butchering venison ‘according to the rules of the chase’, allowing the poet to demonstrate in great detail his own mastery of the arcane jargon of hunting.
The English aristocracy objected to the forest as an arena for exploitative royal jurisdiction, but they undoubtedly did like it as a game reserve and hunting ground. In the 1217 Forest Charter Henry III’s minority council allowed a freeman to clear land in the forest, but placed a significant condition on that freedom. He was not to do it if it involved destroying cover in which game lived. The Forest Charter also specifically stated that archbishops, bishops, earls and barons travelling through the forest in answer to a summons to court were permitted to kill one or two beasts, and in the cases where there were no royal foresters nearby to see what they were doing, they were to sound their horn to give notice that they were openly taking what was permitted. Even when discussing great affairs of state and the reform of the realm, they made it plain that they intended to have their hunting.