THE FOREST OF SHROPSHIRE 225 



In the following . year John Fitzhugh, the keeper of the 

 forest, was instructed to permit Roger de Mortimer or his 

 men to take three harts for the king's use. In 1277 the same 

 keeper was instructed to permit the Bishop of St. Asaph to 

 take all the wood he required for fuel for that year from the 

 wood of the Wrekin, as the king's gift. 



In 1284 the king issued his mandate to the justices and other 

 forest ministers not to molest the Bishop of Bath and Wells, 

 as he had the royal licence to take timber in the king's 

 demesne lands, hays, and woods within the bounds of the 

 forest of Salop, for the construction of a manor house at Acton 

 Burnell, his native place. Two years later a still wider and 

 exceptional licence was granted to Robert the bishop and to 

 Hugh Burnell, his brother, in consideration of the great 

 services the bishop had rendered the king from his earliest 

 years, to fell and take away to his manor great and small 

 timber, without livery, view, or other impediment in the woods 

 of Candover, Wolstanton, Frodsley, Hope Bowdler, Corston, 

 and Rushbury, within the forest bounds. 



Space does not suffice to treat further of the forest of Morf, 

 or, as it was sometimes called, the forest of Bridgnorth, but in 

 connection with this county, rather than Worcestershire, brief 

 attention must be given to Bewdley forest, which, under its 

 more ancient style of Wyre forest, was so vast a district that 

 it gave its name to a whole county ; for Wyre-ceastre, or 

 Worcester, was a Roman station in this forest. When the 

 days of Norman forestry arrived, the primeval state of this 

 great woodland district had materially changed. Wyre forest 

 at that period no longer extended in an unbroken sweep along 

 the Severn to Worcester; but though a portion of its southern 

 extremity was in Worcestershire, by far the larger part of it 

 occupied the south of Shropshire. Eyton gives good reasons 

 for supposing that the Shropshire part of Wyre forest, per- 

 taining to the great manors of Cleobury and Kinlet, belonged 

 to the Crown in Saxon days, but that subsequently it went to 

 William Fitz-Osborn, Earl of Hereford, and then to Ralph 

 Mortimer. The forest rule that the Mortimers endeavoured 

 to maintain, together with the persistence in the use of the 

 term " forest" rather than the chace, point strongly to its being 

 originally under sovereign rule. The best summary of the 

 Q 



