258 THE ROYAL FORESTS OF ENGLAND 



Oxfordshire ; but Plot, in his Natural History of the county, 

 written shortly after the Civil War, described it as sadly shorn 

 during those troublous times of its ancient glory. 



Oxfordshire, strange to say, is destitute of a county history, 

 and the story of its woods and forests is as yet unwritten. 

 The material for an interesting monograph on this subject 

 is fairly abundant ; all that can here be attempted is to give a 

 few facts, for the most part hitherto unchronicled, respecting 

 the two royal forests of Wychwood and Shotover with Sto- 

 wood, together with an incidental reference or two to Bern- 

 wood forest, which lay chiefly in the county of Buckingham. 



The Close Rolls of the beginning of Henry III.'s reign 

 supply a good deal of fragmentary information about the two 

 forests of Wychwood and Shotover. Thomas de Langley 

 was at that time master forester-of-fee for Wychwood. In 

 1216 he received the king's command to permit the abbot 

 of the Cistercian house of Bruern to take a third load of wood 

 out of the forest, in addition to the two loads already granted 

 him. In the following year Langley was instructed to allow 

 William de Brewere to take ten wild boars and ten trees. In 

 1218 order was made for the perambulation of the forest, in 

 order that its ancient bounds might be established and recent 

 additions disafforested. The Crown interfered in 1221 in 

 order that there might be due agistment of pigs, and that the 

 owners of swine within the forest without warrant might be 

 presented ; these instructions were issued to the verderers, 

 the forester-of-fee, and the agisters. Wychwood was one 

 of the royal forests, to the verderers and keepers of which 

 special orders were sent by letters patent as to the extensive 

 windfall after the great storm of 1222. Robert Arsic had per- 

 mission from the Crown in 1223 to hunt the fox and the hare 

 with hounds throughout the forest of Wychwood. In the 

 same year Thomas de Langley was instructed to take two 

 wild boars (porcos silvestres}^ and to transfer them to the royal 

 park of Havering, in Essex. About the like date the keeper 

 was ordered to deliver four good dry roers, two of which were 

 to be suitable for fuel, to the prior of Lanthony. In 1226 

 Ernald de Bosco was granted two does and a buck, and ten 

 loads of dry underwood for fuel were bestowed upon the 

 hospital of St. John Baptist at Burford. Ralph Fitz-Nicholas 



