FORESTRY AND THE NEW FOREST 



Assart (from assartir, ' to make plain ') was ' an Offence committed in the 

 Forest, by pulling up by the Roots the Woods, that are Thickets and 

 Coverts for the Deer, and by making them as plain as arable Land. This 

 is reputed the greatest Offence or Trespass, that can be done in the Forest 

 to Vert or Venison, containing in it Waste, or more ; for whereas Waste of 

 the Forest is but the felling and cutting down of the Coverts, which may 

 grow up in Time again, an Assart is a plucking them up by the Roots, 

 and utterly destroying them, that they can never grow again.' 1 But a man 

 could sue 'for License to Assart his Grounds in the Forest, and to make 

 it several for Tillage ; so that it is no Offence, if done with License' ; and 

 it was this wholesale clearance of woodland into arable land, and more 

 particularly into pasturage, which William Harrison so loudly bewailed 

 in the chapter 'Of Woods and Marishes' in his Description of England 

 given in what is generally known as the Holinshed Chronicles (edition of 

 1586). That the administration of the forest laws regarding purpres- 

 ture, waste and assart frequently degenerated into fearful extortion and 

 oppression can easily be conceived. So much was this the case that the 

 Pipe Rolls sometimes show a whole county entered as '/ misericordia pro 

 foresta.' Great nobles enjoying the royal favour could sometimes save 

 themselves from being subjected to legal punishment or illicit extortion 

 by obtaining, before the triennial 'regard' or visitatio nemorum, a special 

 writ of the king to exempt them from payment of fines for waste. 



The forests of Hants (i.e. the afforested lands) aggregate over 

 73,000 acres, 8 while the 'woodlands (i.e. the woods and plantations) 

 amount to 125,674 acres, out of a total area aggregating about 1,050,056 

 acres for the county.* Except Yorkshire, which has 139,589 acres, 

 this is the largest area classified as woodlands in any other county 

 in England, though it is closely approached by Sussex (124,632 acres, 

 out of a total area of 931,999 acres), the only other county having over 

 100,000 acres; and in Britain, York and Hants are only surpassed by 

 Inverness (150,929 acres, out of a total acreage of 2,784,884 acres). 



1 Cowell, following Manwood's Treatise of the Laws of the Forest. 



* These form four local groups (whose exact area has never been determined), namely : 



Of the 64,737 acres forming the Crown lands in the New Forest, the statistics are as follows 

 (Lascelles, ' A Brief History of the Arboriculture of the New Forest,' in the Transactions of the Royal 

 Scot. Arbor. Soc. (1895), xiv. 16) : Open heaths and pasture, 40,478 acres; open lands with timber 

 4,500 acres; plantations enclosed, 1 1,138 acres ; plantations open, 6,532 acres ; freehold and copyhold 

 of the Crown, 2,089 acres total > 64,737 acres. * Board of Agriculture Returns (1898), p. 40. 



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