A bit about "The New Forest" of the Norman kings...
excerpts from
Landscape and Memory
by Simon Schama
published by Vintage Canada
The writing of Simon Schama about the medieval English forest is wonderful. This excerpt is intended both to edify you, the reader, and to publicize Schama's impressive book on the historical landscape, Landscape and Memory. While his text covers history and landscapes the world over, it is the English medieval landscape which concerns us. Here, then, are just a few paragraphs:
The legend of ravening Norman despotism annihilating whole villages and parishes to create the private hunting reserve of the New Forest was based on the claims of medieval clerics like Oderic and Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, who wrote that "the Conqueror took away much land from God and men and converted it for the use of wild beasts and the sport of his dogs for which he demolished thirty-six churches and exterminated the inhabitants."...
Before the Norman tyranny, it was supposed, Britain had been mantled with the greenwood, a habitat where lord and peasant, thane and churl co-existed in prefeudal reciprocity- the one exercising his hunting rights with moderation, the other allowed the freedom of the woods to pasture his swine and collect the wood for his wattle and hearth...
Greenwood was not... darkling forest where one lost oneself at the entrance to hell. It was something like the exact opposite: the place where one found oneself...
The grim slaughters of Bialowieza and the Teutoburgwald
(hidden forested sites of modern genocidal massacres)
are unthinkable in the sylvan habitat of Merrie England: there it is forever green, always summer. The nightingales sing, the ale is heady, and masters and men are brought together in fellowship by the lord of the jest: Robin Hood...
Behind this fantasy there was a real place. But it hardly resembled the unbroken summery-sylvan idyll of the greenwood. To imagine early medieval England blanketed with vast and immemorially ancient deciduous forests, broken only by stretches of scrubby moor and precarious patches of grainfields and pasture, is to get things the wrong way round. By the time William the Conqueror arrived on the Sussex coast, no more than 15 percent of English territory would have been wooded...
And it would be equally mistaken to imagine the medieval English forests as vast green tanks of silence: dense, impenetrable, and deserted places populated only by bandits and hermits. The expectation that there ought to be hermits in the woods was such that King Stephen went to the length of setting one up in a customized rustic cell in Writtle Forest. The forest as the opposite of court, town, and village- the sylvan remnant of arcady, or what Shakespeare called the "golden world"- was an idea that would lodge tenaciously in the poetic and the pious imagination. But in England (and in much of France as well) the reality was different.
For there were people in the woods: settled, making a livelihood out of its resources, a robust society with its own seasonal rhythms of movement, communication, religion, work, and pleasure. Even the broadest forests were laced with cart tracks, footpaths, and trails which to its adepts were as familiar as Roman roads. The network of tracks ran through a landscape in which town dwellers might become quickly disoriented, but to those who lived there it was mapped by distinctive landmarks: rocky outcrops wrapped in liverwort; ancient lightning-blasted trees; trunks and roots fallen and decayed into shapes suggestive enough to earn nicknames; winding brooks, ponds, and bogs; hummocks and slopes; the ruins of older hearths and walls; the rubble of fugitives; the cinders of charcoal burners.
And the wild animals of the chase often shared the woods with the domestic livestock pastured by the cottagers. Cattle, horses, sheep, and even goats (though they were voraciously destructive of saplings and young coppice shoots) grazed the underwood and any clearings caused naturally by the fall of old trees. But the real lords of the woods were pigs, especially in the "pannage" season from Michaelmas to Martinmas, when they gorged themselves on acorns and beech mast...
Autumn through to late November, when the fattened pigs would be slaughtered, was the busiest time in the woodland societies. As well as pork-curing, dead and fallen wood would be gathered and corded for fuel. Animals, illegal as well as legal, were turned into smoked sausage for the lean winter months. Fruit and berries were dried, honey was harvested from the wild hives, and the chestnuts that were one of the staples of medieval diet (mashed into porridge, ground into meal for primitive loaves) were carefully collected and stored.
The mark of these western woodland societies was not their separation from, but their connection with, the rest of the world. Within the forest perimeter, charcoal was burned that would fire primitive ironworks. Bark was stripped for tanning, fuel drawn for glassworks and breweries, tall timber felled for beams and supports of town houses.
The greenwood, then, was not an imaginary utopia; it was a vigorous working society. And it was just because the English woods were home to all this busy social and economic activity that the imposition of the Norman concept of the forest seemed so brutal... the imposition of forest law was a violent shock. Its fundamental principle, originating in Frankish custom, was the creation of huge areas of special jurisdiction, policed at the king's pleasure and by his direct appointment, for the preservation of game...
But for a warrior state, the royal hunt was always more than a pastime, however compulsively pursued. Outside of war itself, it was the most important blood ritual through which the hierarchy of status and honour around the king was ordered. It may not be too much to characterize it as an alternative court where, free of the clerical domination of regular administration, clans of nobles could compete for proximity to the king. Not surprisingly, the offices of Masters of the Horse and Hunt were fiercely competed for and jealously preserved within the family... From beginning to end... the hunt was not merely a kill that gave potency and authority to the aura of the royal warlord, it was also a ritual demonstration of the discipline and order of his court. No wonder it became a form of treason to spoil the king's aim."
"In the lore of the greenwood, Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror, was a chief and singular villain inheriting his father's lust for venery and his contempt for the traditional common woodland rights of grazing and gleaning...
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