FORESTRY 



Although a considerable proportion of the offenders were dead before the eyre was 

 held, the rolls of venison and vert trespassers show no fewer than 517 separate charges 

 extending over the thirty-four years since the last pleas. 



The gravest charge at this eyre, as at the last, was against an earl of Derby. Robert 

 Earl Ferrers was presented for having in 1264, with a great company of knights and others, 

 hunted in the Campana forest on 7 July and taken forty head of deer and drove another 

 forty out of the forest ; and on I August took fifty and drove away about seventy ; and 

 again on 29 September took forty and drove away a like number. This hunting was 

 planned on a wholesale scale, for thirty-eight are named in the presentment, and there were 

 many others, as well as the earl himself, who were dead before the eyre was held, and others 

 not summoned as they were mere servants of the earl. Eight out of the thirty-eight were 

 knights, and one, Master Nicholas de Marnham, rector of Doddington, Lincoln, was in holy 

 orders. Of those in the earl's train during these three forest affrays hardly any bore Derbyshire 

 names, but came from the counties of Warwick, Leicestershire, Lancashire, York, Cambridge, 

 etc. It has been strangely enough remarked by the only writer who has hitherto cited these 

 presentments (Mr. Yeatman) that 'these tremendous charges,' made long after the earl was 

 dead, 'are utterly incomprehensible,' adding that it seems impossible to suppose that the earl 

 had not full license from the crown to indulge in hunting in the royal forest ! But this writer 

 had clearly forgotten the date of these forest invasions of the young and impetuous Earl Ferrers. 

 It was in 1264, in the very thick of the baronial civil war under Simon de Montfort, of whose 

 cause Robert Ferrers was a hot partisan. On 12 May was fought the battle of Lewes, 

 when the king's forces under Prince Edward (Edward I.) were defeated by those of the 

 barons. For two or three years from that date, as an old chronicler has it, 'there was 

 grievous perturbation in the centre of the realm,' in which Derbyshire pre-eminently shared. 

 There can be no doubt whatever that the three incursions made into the Peak forest in 

 July, August, and September, following the battle of Lewes, were undertaken by Robert Ferrers 

 and his allies (issuing from his great manor house of Hartington) much more to show contempt 

 for the king's forest and preserves and to get booty, than for any purposes of sport. These 

 presentments, if they did nothing else, were a strong protest against the lawlessness of such 

 action. In April of this year Henry III. had come into Derbyshire and lodged for a time 

 at the castle of the Peak after the subjection of Nottingham, and it was from here that he 

 proceeded into Kent and Sussex. 



The king's sojourn here before the battle of Lewes is expressly named in another 

 presentment against Thomas de Furnival, the great lord of Sheffield. Thomas, who was 

 that year bailiff of the Peak, entertained the king at the castle and tarried there until 

 Whitsuntide. On this occasion, after the king had left, the bailiff entered the forest and 

 killed twelve beasts. On various subsequent occasions, both in the reign of Henry III. and 

 Edward I., venison was killed in this forest and taken to Thomas de Furnival's castle at 

 Sheffield. Thomas appeared before the justices and was convicted and imprisoned, but was 

 subsequently released at the king's pleasure for a fine of 200 marks. 



they tarried were the Peak, the Lancashire forests of Blackburnshire and Bowland, and the wolds of 

 Yorkshire. It has been confidently asserted (Elaine, Encyclopaedia of Rural Sports [1858], p. 105) that 

 entries of payment for the destruction of wolves appear in the account books of certain parishes of the 

 East Riding, presumably of the sixteenth or seventeenth century date, but this on examination proves to 

 be an error. They were abundant in Dean forest in the time of Edward I., and tenures of land in the 

 forests of Rockingham and Shirewood on the service of wolf-hunting were renewed in the fifteenth 

 century. The best authorities consider that wolves did not die out in England until the time of 

 Henry VII., 1485-1509. Harting, Extinct Brit, dnimals, 1 15, 205 ; Lydekker, Brit. Mammalia, 95-8 ; 

 Strutt, Sports and Pastimes (1903 ed.), 12, 13. Place and field names afford remarkably abundant 

 evidence of the considerable presence of wolves in North Derbyshire. Woolow (formerly spelt Wolflow), 

 Wolfhope, and Wolfscote, are well known examples. Wolfscote Dale, though not often used, is still the 

 1 map-name for the upper stretch of Dovedale, and Wolfscote Grange, and Wolfscote Hill are close to 

 the forest border. On the opposite side of the Dove, in Staffordshire, is the ridge termed Wolfedge. 

 The village boys of Hartington and Berisford Dale used to play at wolves and wolf-hunting in the 

 ' forties ' of last century, apparently a traditionary game as stated by the late Mr. Beresford Hope. 

 Five cases of wolf in the field names of enclosures within the bounds of the old forest have been found, 

 whilst Wolfpit occurs as a boundary of Priestcliffe common, and Wolfstone of Chinley common in 

 enclosure commissions, temp. Charles I. Among the evidences at St. Mary's College, Spink Hill, is 

 a charter of Robert Ferrers, earl of Derby (who died in 1 1 39), granting lands at Heage, which he held 

 from the king on the service of driving the wolves out of his lordship of Belper, within Duffield 

 Chase, which afterwards became a royal forest. 



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