[36]The names of the fields in the various farms adjoining the Forest—Furzy Close, Heathy Close, Cold Croft, Starvesall, Hungry Hill, Rough Pastures, &c. &c.—are not without meaning. The common Forest proverb of “lark’s-lees,” applied to the soil, pretty clearly, too, shows its quality.
[37]Manwood defines a forest “a certaine territorie of woody grounds and fruitful pastures.” A Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest. London, 1619. Chap. i. f. 18. Wedgwood (Dictionary of English Etymology, vol. ii. p. 34) shows the true meaning of the word, by connecting it with the Welsh gores, gorest, waste, open ground, and goresta, to lie open.
[38]See Mr. Davies’s paper on the Races of Lancashire, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1855, p. 258. In Domesday, as before, under Clatinges, p. xviii. a, we find, “Silva inutilis,” that is, a wood which has no beech, oak, ash, nor holly, but only yews or thorns, equivalent to the entry, “Silva sine pasnagio,” under Anne, p. xix. a. (See, too, Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, vol. i. p. 99.) Whilst under Borgate, p. iv. b, we find, “Pastura quæ reddebat xl porcos est in forestâ Regis.”
[39]See Manwood, as before, ff. 1-5.
[40]In the Charta de Forestâ of Canute (Manwood, f. 3, sect. 27) mention is made in the forests of horses, cows, and wild goats which are all protected; and from sect. 28 it is plain that, under certain limitations, people might cut fuel. These, with other privileges, such as killing game on their own lands (see sect. xxx. f. 4)—for, by theory, all game was the King’s—were compensations given to the forester for being subject to Forest Law.
Further, from the Charta de Forestâ of Henry III. (Manwood, ff. 6-11), we find that persons had houses and farms, and even woods, in the very centre of the King’s forests; and the charter provides that they may there, on their own lands, build mills on the forest streams, sink wells, and dig marl-pits, referring, most probably, in the last case, to the New Forest, where marl has been used, from time immemorial, to manure the land; and, further, that in their own woods, even though in the forest, they might keep hawks, and go hawking. (See f. 7, sects. xii., xiii.)
It shows, too, that there was a population who gained their livelihood, as to this day, by huckstering, buying and selling small quantities of timber, making brushes, and dealing in bark and coal, which last article evidently points to the Forest of Dean. (F. 7, sect. xiv.)
We must not imagine that the Charta de Forestâ of Henry III. was entirely a series of new privileges. They were, with some notable exceptions, simply those rights which had been received from the earliest times in compensation for some of the hardships of the Forest Laws, and which had been wrested away, probably by Richard or John, but which had never been granted to those who dwelt outside the Forest. (On this point see especially “Ordinatio Foreste,” 33rd Edward I., Statutes of the Realm, vol. i. p. 144. And again, “Ordinatio Foreste,” 34th Edward I., sect. vi., same volume, p. 149, where the rights of pasturage are re-allowed to those who have lost it by the recent perambulation made in the twenty-ninth year of the King’s reign.)
I think we may, therefore, gain from these clauses, especially when taken in conjunction with those of the Charta de Forestâ of Canute, a tolerably correct picture of an ancient forest—that it consisted not merely of large timber and thick underwood, a cover for deer, but of extensive plains,—still here preserved in the various leys—grazed over by cattle, with here and there cultivated spots, and homesteads inhabited by a poor, but industrious, population.