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A royal forest, occasionally known as a kingswood (), is an area of land with different definitions in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The term forest in the ordinary modern understanding refers to an area of wooded land; however, the original medieval sense was closer to the modern idea of a "preserve" – i.e. land legally set aside for specific purposes such as royal hunting – with less emphasis on its composition. There are also differing and contextual interpretations in Continental Europe derived from the Carolingian and Merovingian legal systems.
In Anglo-Saxon England, though the kings were great huntsmen, they never set aside areas declared to be "outside" (Latin foris) the law of the land. Historians find no evidence of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs (c. 500 to 1066) creating forests. However, under the Norman kings (after 1066), by royal prerogative forest law was widely applied. The law was designed to protect the "venison and the vert". In this sense, venison meant "noble" animals of the chase – notably Red deer and fallow deer, the roe deer, and wild boar – and vert meant the greenery that sustained them. Forests were designed as Medieval hunting reserved for the monarch or (by invitation) the aristocracy. The concept was introduced by the Normans to England in the 11th century, and at the height of this practice in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, fully one-third of the land area of Southern England was designated as royal forest. At one stage in the 12th century, all of Essex was afforested. On accession Henry II declared all of Huntingdonshire to be a royal forest.
Afforestation, in particular the creation of the New Forest, figured large in the folk history of the "Norman yoke", which magnified what was already a grave social ill: "the picture of prosperous settlements disrupted, houses burned, evicted, all to serve the pleasure of the foreign tyrant, is a familiar element in the English national story .... The extent and intensity of hardship and of depopulation have been exaggerated", H. R. Loyn observed. Forest law prescribed harsh punishment for anyone who committed any of a range of offences within the forests; by the mid-17th century, enforcement of this law had died out, but many of England's woodlands still bore the title "Royal Forest". During the Middle Ages, the practice of reserving areas of land for the sole use of the aristocracy was common throughout Europe.
Royal forests usually included large areas of heath, grassland and wetland – anywhere that supported deer and other game. In addition, when an area was initially designated forest, any villages, towns and fields that lay within it were also subject to forest law. This could foster resentment as the local inhabitants were then restricted in the use of land they had previously relied upon for their livelihoods; however, common rights were not extinguished, but merely curtailed.
In the South West of England, forests extended across the Late Jurassic Clay Vale. In the Midlands, the clay plain surrounding the River Severn was heavily wooded. Clay soils in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire formed another belt of woodlands. In Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey, woodlands were established on sandy, gravelly, acid soils. In the Scots Highlands, a "deer forest" generally has no trees at all.
Marshlands in Lincolnshire were afforested. Upland moors too were chosen, such as Dartmoor and Exmoor in the South West, and the Peak Forest of Derbyshire. The North Yorkshire moors, a sandstone plateau, had a number of royal forests.
The five animals of the forest protected by law were given by John Manwood as the hart and Red deer (i.e. male and female red deer), boar, European hare and wolf. (In England, the boar became extinct in the wild by the 13th century, and the wolf by the late 15th century.) Protection was also said to be extended to the beasts of chase, namely the Deer and (fallow deer), fox, marten, and roe deer, and the beasts and fowls of Free warren: the hare, European rabbit, Common pheasant, and partridge. In addition, inhabitants of the forest were forbidden to bear hunting weapons, and dogs were banned from the forest; English Mastiff were permitted as watchdogs, but they had to have their front claws removed to prevent them from hunting game. The rights of chase and of warren (i.e. to hunt such beasts) were often granted to local nobility for a fee, but were a separate concept.
Trespasses against the vert were extensive: they included purpresture, assarting, clearing forest land for agriculture, and felling trees or clearing shrubs, among others. These laws applied to any land within the boundary of the forest, even if it were freely owned; although the Charter of the Forest in 1217 established that all freemen owning land within the forest enjoyed the rights of agistment and pannage. Under the forest laws, bloody hand was a kind of trespass by which the offender, being apprehended and found with his hands or other body part stained with blood, is judged to have killed the deer, even though he was not found hunting or chasing.
Afforested lands on the edge of the forest were known as purlieus; agriculture was permitted here and deer escaping from the forest into them were permitted to be killed if causing damage.
The chief royal official was the warden. As he was often an eminent and preoccupied magnate, his powers were frequently exercised by a deputy. He supervised the and under-foresters, who personally went about preserving the forest and game and apprehending offenders against the law. The supervised pannage and agistment and collected any fees thereto appertaining. The nomenclature of the officers can be somewhat confusing: the rank immediately below the constable was referred to as foresters-in-fee, or, later, woodwards, who held land in the forest in exchange for rent, and advised the warden. They exercised various privileges within their . Their subordinates were the under-foresters, later referred to as forest ranger. The rangers are sometimes said to be patrollers of the purlieu.
Another group, called serjeanty-in-fee, and later, foresters-in-fee (not to be confused with the above), held small estates in return for their service in patrolling the forest and apprehending offenders.
The forests also had surveyors, who determined the boundaries of the forest, and regarders. These last reported to the court of justice-seat and investigated encroachments on the forest and invasion of royal rights, such as assarting. While their visits were infrequent, due to the interval of time between courts, they provided a check against collusion between the foresters and local offenders.
In practice, these fine distinctions were not always observed. In the Forest of Dean, swainmote and the court of attachment seem to have been one and the same throughout most of its history. As the courts of justice-seat were held less frequently, the lower courts assumed the power to fine offenders against the forest laws, according to a fixed schedule. The courts of justice-seat crept into disuse, and in 1817, the office of justice in eyre was abolished and its powers transferred to the First Commissioner of Woods and Forests. Courts of swainmote and attachment went out of existence at various dates in the different forests. A Court of Swainmote was re-established in the New Forest in 1877.
Several forests were alienated by Richard II and his successors, but generally the system decayed. Henry VII revived "Swainmotes" (forest courts) for several forests and held Forest Eyres in some of them. Henry VIII in 1547 placed the forests under the Court of Augmentations with two Masters and two Surveyors-General. On the abolition of that court, the two surveyors-general became responsible to the Exchequer. Their respective divisions were north and south of the River Trent.
The last serious exercise of forest law by a court of justice-seat (Forest Eyre) seems to have been in about 1635, in an attempt to raise money.
Cecil made the first steps towards abolition of the forests, as part of James I's policy of increasing his income independently of Parliament. Cecil investigated forests that were unused for royal hunting and provided little revenue from timber sales. Knaresborough Forest in Yorkshire was abolished. Revenues in the Forest of Dean were increased through sales of wood for iron smelting. Enclosures were made in Chippenham and Blackmore for herbage and pannage.
Cranfield commissioned surveys into assart lands of various forests, including Feckenham, Sedgemoor and Selwood, laying the foundations of the wide-scale abolition of forests under Charles I. The commissioners appointed raised over £25,000 by compounding with occupiers, whose ownership was confirmed, subject to a fixed rent. Cranfield's work led directly to the disafforestation of Gillingham Forest in Dorset and Chippenham and Blackmore in Wiltshire. Additionally, he created the model for the abolition of the forests followed throughout the 1630s.
Each disafforestation would start with a commission from the Exchequer, which would survey the forest, determine the lands belonging to the crown, and negotiate compensation for landowners and tenants whose now-traditional rights to use of the land as commons would be revoked. A legal action by the Attorney General would then proceed in the Court of Exchequer against the forest residents for intrusion, which would confirm the settlement negotiated by the commission. Crown lands would then be granted (leased), usually to prominent courtiers, and often the same figures that had undertaken the commission surveys. Legal complaints about the imposed settlements and compensation were frequent.
The disafforestations caused riots and Skimmington processions resulting in the destruction of enclosures and reoccupation of grazing lands in a number of West Country forests, including Gillingham, Braydon and Dean, known as the Western Rising. Riots also took place in Feckenham, Leicester and Malvern. The riots followed the physical enclosure of lands previously used as commons, and frequently led to the destruction of fencing and hedges. Some were said to have had a "warlike" character, with armed mobs numbering hundreds, for instance in Feckenham. The rioters in Dean fully destroyed the enclosures surrounding 3,000 acres in groups that numbered thousands of participants.
The disturbances tended to involve artisans and cottagers who were not entitled to compensation. The riots were hard to enforce against, due to the lack of efficient militia, and the low-born nature of the participants. Ultimately, however, enclosure succeeded, with the exceptions of Dean and Malvern Chase.
In 1641, Parliament passed the Delimitation of Forests Act 1640 (16 Cha. 1. c. 16, also known as John Selden's Act) to revert the forest boundaries to the positions they had held at the end of the reign of James I.
In the late 1780s, a royal commission was appointed to inquire into which Crown woods were surviving, and their condition. It found only one north of the Trent, Sherwood Forest. South of the Trent, it found the New Forest, three others in Hampshire, Windsor Forest in Berkshire, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Waltham or Epping Forest in Essex, three forests in Northamptonshire, and Wychwood in Oxfordshire. Some of these no longer had swainmote courts, and thus had no official supervision. The commission divided the remaining forests into two classes, those with the Crown as major landowner, and those without. In certain Hampshire forests and in the Forest of Dean most of the soil belonged to the Crown, and these became reserved to grow timber to meet the need for oak for shipbuilding. The others would be enclosed, the Crown receiving an "allotment" (compensation) in lieu of its rights.
In 1810, responsibility for woods was moved from Surveyors-General (who accounted to the Auditors of Land Revenue) to a new Commission of Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues. In 1832 "Works and Buildings" were added to their responsibilities, but removed in 1851. In 1924, the royal forests were transferred to the new Forestry Commission (later to become Forestry England).
It is a remnant of an older, much larger, royal hunting forest, which derived its name from its status as the shire (or sher) wood of Nottinghamshire, which extended into several neighbouring counties, bordered on the west along the River Erewash and the Forest of East Derbyshire. When the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, the forest covered perhaps a quarter of Nottinghamshire in woodland and heath subject to the forest laws. Sherwood Forest has historic associations with Robin Hood.
A fragment of the forest is designated as Birklands And Bilhaugh, a Site of Special Scientific Interest. This ancient oak-birch woodland is home to the Major Oak and has an exceptional diversity of invertebrate species associated with old trees and dead wood.
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| High moorlands | |
| Midland clay plain, oak forest | |
| Sandstone with glacial sands and gravels and fertile clay;wetlands | |
| Boulder clay, fertile lands | |
| High moorlands | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Midlands clay plain | |
| Midlands clay plain | |
| Marsh, fens | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands; upland moors | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands; upland moors | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Limestone uplands | |
| Sandstone upland plateau | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Clay plain, woodlands | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Clay soils, woodlands | |
| Sandy, gravelly acid soils; dry oak, birch wood | |
| Midland clay plain, woodlands | |
| Heavy clay soils, dense oak forest | |
| Sir Thomas Fitzadam was Royal Forester of Glencree in 1219. In 1244, sixty does and twenty bucks were ordered to be "taken alive in the king's parks nearest to the port of Chester to be sent to the port of Dalkey, Ireland, and delivered to the king's Treasurer in Dublin to stock the king's Park of Glencry."
In 1282, William le Deveneys was granted 12 oaks from the King's forest of Glencree. William de Meones was keeper of the forest and of "the Queen's timber works" in 1290. It is last mentioned in the reign of Edward I and is believed to have been destroyed during the Bruce campaign in Ireland (1315–18). | Podzol, oak trees |
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