A HISTORY OF SURREY 



and some Sussex iron may have come through by the Godstone and 

 Croydon road. But for the most part the ' backwoods ' of Surrey were 

 impenetrably sealed to any considerable commerce and to warlike opera- 

 tions. It throws light upon the preparations against invasion, more than 

 once, to remember that an enemy landing upon the Sussex coast before 

 about 1750 could not have marched upon London by the shortest line 

 with baggage and artillery beyond the lightest. 



The character of the woodland skirts of the county led to a curious 

 chapter in its mediaeval history. Besides the great forest which made 

 the southern parts of Surrey a wilderness in the earlier Middle Ages, and 

 which at the time of the Domesday Survey had rendered useless or 

 impossible any strict delimitation between it and Sussex, a forest country 

 lay upon the north-west of the county also. The whole of the west was 

 girdled by it indeed. The Wealden Forest was originally connected 

 with Woolmer Forest and Alice Holt Wood in Hampshire. North of 

 the Wey valley about Farnham the barren heaths of Bagshot Sand, sandy 

 commons studded with clumps of thorn and fir, with peat bogs in the 

 hollows between them, extended to the slopes above the Thames valley 

 and the mouth of the Wey, where the local names bear witness to woods 

 existing in early days. This was a thinly inhabited country, all forest in 

 the original sense of the word, that is wild uncultivated land. On what 

 particular principle the boundary line between Hampshire and Berkshire 

 and Surrey had been drawn through it does not appear. Probably the 

 limits of the Chertsey lands at Egham and Chobham, the latter including 

 at least part of Windlesham, and the limits of Pirbright, detached from 

 Woking and belonging to the de Clares, served to fix part of the 

 boundary, so as to throw into Surrey the estates of these essentially 

 Surrey landowners. The fact that the Surrey boundary was recognized 

 as including all these places helped to limit later an attempted extension 

 of royal rights which forms an interesting episode in mediaeval Surrey 

 history. 



The extension of the royal forests was an important object to the 

 king. Their creation may have been due to a love of hunting ; their 

 continuance and enlargement certainly aimed at other ends. Forests 

 embraced in their limits inhabited places and cultivated lands, and the 

 king was master in his forests in a way in which even an early 

 Plantagenet king was not master elsewhere. Justices of the forests, 

 bailiffs and stewards over-rode the jurisdiction of the sheriff and the 

 ordinary law. Local franchises, and even ecclesiastical rights, could not 

 stand against them ; and there no earl intercepted the third penny of the 

 royal revenues. Windsor was a forest in the time of the Conqueror, 

 and even then included land in Surrey. 1 Henry II. further proceeded to 

 afforest his manors of Guildford, Woking, Brookwood and part of Stoke, 

 and finally declared the whole county to be forest. 2 So at least it was 

 subsequently affirmed with apparent truth, though the stretch of power 



1 Domesday, 32, a. 2, Pirford. 3 Close Rolls, 9 Hen. III. m. 6. 



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