FORESTRY 



I 



central and western parts of Nottinghamshire were thickly wooded from the earliest 

 times. The place-name terminal ' field ' always spelt ' feld ' in old English 

 meaning a place where trees have been felled, or as we now say a clearing, is to be 

 found exclusively in the western half of the shire, as in Ashfield, Balkfield, Basingfield, 

 Eastfield, Farnsfield, Haggonsfield, Highfield, and Mansfield. 



This well-wooded portion of Nottinghamshire became a great hunting district or forest for the 

 early Norman kings. The Domesday Survey seldom makes any reference to a forest, but the 

 Nottinghamshire portion of the Great Survey shows that a considerable number of the places within 

 the woodland district were terra regis, so that the amount of royal demesne made its conversion by 

 the Conqueror or his immediate successor into a large forest a comparatively easy matter. 1 



It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to say that the term forest did not originally, either in its 

 etymological or customary signification, imply a wood, but rather a great waste reserved for royal 

 hunting purposes, and necessarily including certain woods and underwoods as coverts for the deer and 

 other game. The forest of Nottingham or Sherwood, though including various open tracts of 

 country, was far more thickly and generally wooded than many of the old forests, and afforded a 

 notable contrast to the forest of the High Peak in the adjoining county of Derby, where the 

 proportion of woodland was very small. 2 



In early days this great tract of country, which then embraced at least a fourth of the whole 

 county, was known in various documents as the forest of Nottingham, 3 but the equivalent term of 

 Sherwood 4 soon became the more usual expression. The first exact notice of this forest occurs in the 

 year 1 1 54, when William Peverel the younger answered to the forest pleas. He controlled the forest 

 and held the profits under the crown. On the forfeiture of the Peverel estates, early in the reign of 

 Henry II, the forest lapsed to the king, and was for some time administered by the successive sheriffs 

 of the joint counties of Nottingham and Derby. 



In the lifetime of Richard I the forest of Sherwood was held by his brother John, earl of 

 Morton. The earl, by charter, granted to Ralph FitzStephen and Maud de Caux his wife, all 

 liberties and custody of the forest of Sherwood, including permission to hunt hare, fox, cat, and 

 squirrel with dogs and hounds ; 5 all windfallen wood ; the valuable inner bark or bast of the lime 

 trees ; a skep out of every cartload of salt passing through the forest, and half a skep from a half 

 load ; the after pannage (retro-pannagiuni) for pigs ; all pleas of unlawed dogs ; together with all 

 goods and chattels belonging to thieves or ' brybours,' 6 taken by them within the forest. 



The same charter sanctioned the holding of a park at Lexington (Laxton) 7 by Ralph and 

 Maud, wherein they might hunt deer as they pleased without molestation, and also granted them 

 seventy acres of assart or inclosure at Lexington and Gedling free of view of the forest ministers. 8 



This definite mention of robbers and thieves in Sherwood Forest in the time of Richard I, 

 which has not, we believe, been previously cited, causes a short digression to be made from the dry 

 sequence of historic facts. The very name of Sherwood at once brings to the mind the early tales 



1 Royal hunting grounds (slha regis) as distinct from the king's lands or royal demesnes (terra regis) pro- 

 bably existed here long before the Conquest. Cox, Royal Forests of England, 4. 

 1 V.C.H.Derb. 397-413. 



3 Anct. Forest Proc. Chan. No. 3, A.D. 1218 ; No. 24, A.D. 1232. 



4 The earlier form was almost invariably ShirewoJe or ShineoJe ; the name probably came from a 

 considerable length of the forest bound being also the bound between the two shires of Derby and Nottingham. 



5 There were roedeer in Sherwood Forest, but they were probably never numerous, and died out at a 

 comparatively early date. There was a single presentment for killing a roebuck at the eyre of 1 5 Edw. I. 

 Sherwood was so intersected with roads and by-roads, included so many fairly populous places within its limits 

 or on its fringes, and was so destitute of great heights, ravines, or gorges, that it could at no time be com- 

 pared with such wild districts as the Peak Forest, or certain parts of the royal forests of Lancashire and 

 Yorkshire. As Sir Robert Plumpton held a bovate of land in Sherwood, called Wolfhunt land, as late as 1433, 

 by the service of scaring the wolves by winding a horn, it has sometimes been supposed that wolves remained 

 in Sherwood as late as the reign of Henry VI. But such a surmise is altogether untenable ; the survival or 

 repetition of an old manorial service proves nothing. 



6 Bribour was a mid-English term for a robber or pickpocket. 



7 Laxton was outside the forest when the bounds were lessened by the forest charter of Henry III. 



8 Exch. K. R. Acct. Forests, &^-, 6, 7. This is a paper book of 152 pages, written in English, 

 temp. James I. It is a sort of directory of proceedings as to the laws and customs of Sherwood Forest. It 

 contains the charter of the forest of Henry III, and various local charters and regulations, with the bounds and 

 metes of the different hays of the king and of the abbot of RufFord, the chapters of the ' regard ' temp. Edw. Ill, 

 together with the oaths of the forest ministers, as well as highly interesting definitions of the courts and customs 

 of the forest. 



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