A HISTORY OF SUSSEX 



those compounded with hurst or herst, meaning wood, and field or fold, indicative of an open space 

 within, or on the fringe of, forest or wood. 



It is not so plain why the great majority of bursts are in the eastern half of the county, and the 

 folds or fields chiefly in its western portion. For out of 1 50 bursts which the writer has found in 

 Sussex, by far the greater proportion, ninety at least, occur in the eastern half ; while the folds and 

 fields vhose total number is but a third of the hursts are twice as numerous in the west as 

 compared with those in the east. 10 But Andredeswald still preserved to a large extent its primaeval 

 state. Bede indeed described it in his day as almost inaccessible, the haunt of wild swine and deer. 

 Therein, too, outlaws would find asylum, or the fallen tyrant, refugee from a people's wrath ; such 

 as Sigebert of Wessex, who, in 755, fearing a well-deserved death for his crimes, fled to ' the great 

 wood called Andredeswald, but was met there and slain by a certain swineherd,' whose master 

 Sigebert had unjustly put to death. 11 



It is chiefly in deeds of gift and endowment of religious corporations that we find mention of 

 the woods and forests of Sussex during the Saxon period. Canterbury, as the head quarters of English 

 Christianity, was endowed with many manors in Sussex, which possessed much woodland. In 

 addition to Pagham with its three woods, the archbishops were lords of Tarring, near Worthing. 

 But their most wooded possession was the great manor of South Mailing, confirmed to the see in 

 838 by Egbert, 12 a lordship that stretched from Cliffe (now part of Lewes) to Buxted originally 

 perhaps to Lamberhurst and included eight or more sub-manors. The greater part of this was 

 virgin woodland, as we may judge from the number of parks, together with one forest, it contained ; 

 and also from the fact that the court rolls of its manors, right up to Reformation times, continually 

 contain 13 entries of ' new rents ' arising from ' new assarts,' i.e., from woodland newly cleared of 

 timber, and brought under the plough or the spade. 



One parish alone, Ringmer, contained three parks and the aforesaid forest, called the Broyle, 

 which was, however, strictly speaking, a chase, probably retaining the erroneous designation as a 

 memento of the early days in which it was a forest of the Saxon kings. The metropolitan see also 

 possessed, by the gift of a certain thane Wulfric, in 947, Patching, 14 with its beechwoods, celebrated 

 for truffles. 



With the Norman invasion abundant material is available for the history of Sussex forests, 

 parks, and chases. This being so it seems desirable that the reader should here be reminded of the 

 definite and strictly technical meanings attached to the words forest, chase, park. It is particularly 

 necessary to disabuse the mind of the idea that a forest is merely a vast assemblage of trees growing 

 densely and darkly together, through whose gloom narrow paths and tracks and here and there a 

 brooklet mysteriously meander, and withal, full of fierce beasts, and replenished with robbers. As a 

 matter of fact a forest is an extensive track of wild, woody, and uncultivated land, comprising every 

 variety of the natural conformation of the surface of the country in which it is situated, contained 

 within certain metes and bounds, albeit uninclosed with any hedge or wall, though here and there 

 maybe defined for some part of its verge by a fence, bank, or pale. Further, a forest must shelter 

 various wild beasts, as boar, roebuck, and the red ' tall deer that King William loved like a 

 father,' while it usually contained a variety of others, as wild cat, badger, fox. Of birds, too, the 

 Sussex forests were the favourite fastnesses ; in their tall pines the hawks and falcons nested. The 

 ferns, bracken, and heather harboured pheasants and grouse (including the beautiful black-cock, now 

 extinct in Sussex), and formed a covert for coneys innumerable. It is not necessary to enlarge on 

 the value set on the hawk tribe. In the Archbishop's Court Rolls 15 of Mayfield and Framfield 

 during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are records of the receipt each year of ' iiu. iiiid. 

 from the tenants that they may be exonerated from safeguarding a sparrow-hawk's nest,' entries that 

 imply a customary obligation in earlier times of keeping ward over one sparrow-hawk's nest every 

 year. 



Necessary and supplementary to these birds and beasts, of which the deer of different kinds 

 were called ' the venison ' of the forest, was ' the vert,' the vegetation in its variety, timber trees, 

 shrubs, and underwoods ; herbage to sustain the deer, broom and bracken to shelter them. In 

 addition a legal forest must have its laws and customs and its justices, with their ' eyres ' nominally 

 held every three years, but actually at much wider intervals while a host of forest officers kept 

 watch and ward over the 'vert and venison,' viz., foresters, rangers, verderers, wood-reeves, regarders, 

 agistors, beadles, the chief of whom also held courts, viz., the swain-motes held three times a year, 

 and the wood-motes every forty days ; while together with ' good and lawful men ' of the forest 



10 Isaac Taylor considers that ' the name of nearly every place in the weald is formed in part by a syllable 

 having reference to the vast forest.' 



11 Henry of Huntingdon, Hist. Angl. (Rolls Ser.), 123 ; Roger of Hoveden, Chron. (Rolls Ser.), i, 21. 

 " Birch, Cartul. Sax. No. 421. 



13 Court Rolls of South Mailing, Ringmer, Uckfield, and Lambeth. u Cartul. Sax. 823. 



15 Court Rolls, Lambeth, Nos. 1308, 1307, 1321, and others. 



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