IT is perhaps a
matter for surprise that the New Forest, with its peculiar
institutions and agriculture, its outstanding biological interest
and its ease of access, has escaped the close attention of little
more than a handful of historians and field scientists in recent
years. Despite its ready accessibility it has comparatively seldom
been used as a teaching arena. Its unenclosed woodlands and
heath-lands, however, today comprise the largest single unit of
'semi-natural' or 'unsown' vegetation remaining in the Lowland zone
of Britain, and for this reason it is unlikely that the neglect of
the past will be long perpetuated. As urban and industrial
development and agricultural reclamation continue to reduce and
fragment the ground available elsewhere for biological,
archaeological and other field studies, so attention is likely to
become focused more closely on the Forest. Such a trend is already
discernible.
The origins of the
New Forest lie deep in the domains of the later Saxon kings who
claimed as part of their prerogative the right to reserve to
themselves the chase, at least of the deer, over any part of their
kingdom which they might define. These Royal hunting grounds, as
well as the demesne lands of the Crown, were gradually formed from
what had formerly been the folkland, common to all. The
restrictions on the use of the Royal hunting grounds, other than by
the Crown or its nominees, became progressively more restrictive
until they assumed the rigorous nature of the Norman Forest
Laws.
It has commonly been
asserted that much of the New Forest was Royal Forest before the
Conquest. Satisfactory evidence in support of this is lacking,
however. All that can be said is that the area had been afforested
by 1086, the date of the Domesday compilation, and that much, if
not all of the afforestation can be attributed to William
I.
The act of
afforestation and the subsequent management of a Forest were
directed mainly towards the conservation of deer for the chase
and—probably more important—as a reservoir of meat 'on
the hoof, and of hides, which could be tapped as and when required.
A Forest did not necessarily imply a tree covering, nor did it
preclude the continued holding of private lands within it, but
might be best described as an area subject to Forest Law in
contradistinction to Common Law. Forest Law provided for the
regulation and control of all activities which could conceivably be
contrary to the purpose of the Forest and laid down various
penalties for infringement. It is well known that in Norman England
these penalties were extreme—a man might lose his life for
the killing of a stag—but later, successive modifications
introduced a degree of leniency towards Forest offences which,
together with the various privileges which eventually became known
as rights of common, formed a considerable compensation for the
restrictions on economic expansion which Forest Law
implied.
Afforestation was
based on the prerogative enjoyed by the sovereign that all wild
animals were in his possession. Forests generally —and
medieval documentary evidence shows that this was the case in the
New Forest—included the lands of subjects besides those of
the Crown. Before the Charta de Foresta of 1217, such lands could
not—in theory at any rate—be enclosed, nor could timber
be felled on them, cultivation take place or game be killed:
subsequently it was allowed under licence from the Crown. Their
major value, therefore, lay in their grazings. Clearly it would
have been unreasonable to prohibit fencing and at the same time to
enforce restrictions on the roaming of stock on to the Crown land,
and as a matter of practical management the right of free range of
stock appears to have gained mutual acceptance and to have been the
origin of many later rights of grazing.
Although the first
consideration in the management of a Forest was the deer, it is
known that pre-existing pastoral land uses and other exploitation
of the soil were allowed to continue, but that such exploitation
was subject to close control and definition.
Before
afforestation, the common wastes would have been freely grazed.
Pigs would have been turned out on the mast in the autumn
—the Domesday valuation of woodland turns on its capacity to
maintain swine—timber, turves and peat taken for fuel,
bracken cut for bedding and litter, and to some extent at least,
game killed, as necessities to the survival of the communities.
Under Forest Law the exploitation of these natural resources became
controlled for the benefit of the deer and, with the passing of
time, became rights of common exercised by immemorial prescription
under privilege of the Crown, eventually in the New Forest becoming
defined and limited and recognised by statute in the late
seventeenth century.
Medieval Forest Law
provided for the removal of cattle from the Forest during the
midsummer fence month (20 June-20 July), when the hinds and does
were dropping their calves and fawns respectively, and during the
winter heyning (November to May), the period of the year when keep
was shortest. Together these periods covered more than six months
of the year, but there is evidence to show that in the spacious
conditions of the New Forest the winter heyning, at least, was not
customarily observed, certainly by later medieval times. The period
during which pigs might be turned out was restricted to about two
months in the autumn, when the mast fell. Here the interests of
both Crown and commoners were served: green acorns, although
perfectly good pig food, can, when eaten in excess and without a
considerable bulk of fibrous food, cause death by poisoning in both
cattle and deer. It was, therefore, in the interests of the Crown
that pig should compete with deer for the green acorns until late
November.
Today, much of the
periphery of the Forest, and most pockets of enclosed agricultural
land within it, comprise small or comparatively small holdings to
which are attached the various rights which may be exercised over
the unenclosed commons. Most holdings are under about fifty acres,
and the profitable management of many rests largely on the exercise
of their common rights, particularly that of grazing. The economy
of individual holdings varies greatly, but the long established
basic system has been for the meadows to be shut up for hay and the
stock run on the Forest until keep becomes short there. The
holdings thus have the capacity to reduce both overheads in
purchased food-stuffs and capital outlay in land. For several
hundred years the agricultural economy has been based on the use of
the common grazings.
Together with the
deer, the exploitation of the Forest for grazing, fuel, marl and
other purposes, as integral parts of the rural economy, have been
significant modifying forces in the ecological history of the
unenclosed lands. In particular, the 'grazing force' has set limits
on woodland regeneration and has been a major factor in checking a
succession to woodland on the open heaths. It is thus important to
explore the history and structure of the agricultural economy and,
specifically, to try to identify fluctuations in the number of
stock turned out and the economic factors involved.
The importance of
common rights and the extent to which they were exercised over the
New Forest before the seventeenth century can be deduced only from
their invariable inclusion in grants of land by the Crown; from
presentments at the Forest Courts as to their abuse; and from the
petitions of commoners alleging unreasonable restrictions of their
rights. The fragmentary evidence from these sources suggests that
in medieval times the area supported a vigorous pastoral economy,
although it is not possible to construct a sensitive picture of its
changing fortunes over the centuries. Certainly, from the
thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, cattle, ponies and to some
extent, sheep, were grazed on the Forest, often —according to
presentments to the Forest Courts—in numbers which were
considered excessive. Some of the biggest graziers were evidently
the various religious houses in the area—the Abbey at
Beaulieu; the Priories at Christchurch and Braemore. At the same
time it is clear that the commons were equally important to the
occupiers of much smaller holdings, as is evidenced by the
complaint of certain copyholders of the manor of Cadnam and Winsor,
adjacent to the Forest, to the Court of Chancery in 1591. The
Lord of the Manor was attempting to enclose the manorial waste. The
complainants deposed that they were, 'poore copieholders of the
manor of Cadnam and Winsor, and their whole estates and livynge'
depended on the use of the common, 'so that yf they should be
abrydged of their annycent customes it would be their utter
undoing'. The common remains unenclosed to this day, despite a
further enclosure attempt during the nineteenth century—on
which occasion the earlier decision of Chancery was produced as
evidence by the copyholders of the manor.
If the
pre-seventeenth century evidence is sparse, the New Forest is
probably unique for its later successive Register of Claims to
common rights—the first compiled in 1635—and for the
volume of nineteenth- and twentieth-century material amplifying the
importance of the rights in the local economy; little of which had
previously been studied more than cursorily until
recently.
The first and second
Registers, compiled by the Regarders on the occasion of the Justice
Seats, or Forest Eyres, held in 1635 and 1670, are essentially
similar, but the latter has the advantage of a good English
translation from the original Latin. The entries are long and
detailed and give a good picture of the importance attached to
rights of common and their place in the rural economy.
A total of 307
claims were registered, appertaining to about 65,000 acres of land
lying within the limits of the Forest as they appear to have been
at Domesday.
The figures given by
the Report of the New Forest Committee, 1947, show
that the total number of stock on the Forest during the period
1910-1914 averaged 3,595 head annually. In 1915 it stood at 3,200
and in 1916 at 3,130. Mounting market prices, mainly for dairy
produce, are reflected in a corresponding rise in stock
numbers—mainly cattle—to a peak of 4,550 in 1920.
Thereafter there is a steady decline, following falling prices,
until at the outbreak of war in 1939 there were only 1,757 animals
on the Forest, of which about 1,000 were cattle—an all-time
low. A particularly serious blow to the small commoner between the
wars was the loss of his farmhouse butter trade in the face of
wholesale importation from Australia and New Zealand, on top of
which the importation of Danish bacon began to crush his pig
trade.
The national trend
to liquid milk production appears to have been followed by a large
proportion of the commoners. Kenching-ton, commenting on the
effects of the inter-war period on the smaller commoners, noted
that 'Cheap corn and cake well suited the grazier, stockman, pigman
and poultryman side of the forester's agriculture. . . .' The low
overheads made possible by the use of the commons, enabled the
small commoner as a class to 'get by', the profits from the family
holding, such as they were, being supplemented by work in the
growing light industry zone of Southampton.
In 1940 the stock
figure stood at 1,479—571 ponies and 908 cattle. Thereafter,
with rising market prices for heifers and dairy produce
—traditionally one of the commoners' main lines of
production— and the new trade in horseflesh, the numbers of
stock on the Forest rose steadily. In 1946 it stood at 3,082 cattle
and 775 ponies. In 1963 the total number of ponies on the Forest
was in excess of 2,000 and the number of cattle on the Forest in
the summer was around 3,000. The upward trend in numbers has
continued since.
The period 1944-1952
saw the first deliberate efforts to improve the Forest grazings.
During the inter-war period, with only small numbers of stock on
the Forest, the grazings had suffered a deterioration to scrub and,
with the drive by the War Agricultural Executive Committee to
encourage the rearing of dairy stock, it was apparent that some
reclamation was necessary. Accordingly, between 1944 and 1948 some
1,000 acres were cropped and finally seeded down, most of the sites
having remained in fairly good condition since, although a
reversion to indigenous grass species is generally apparent. Three
further areas were reclaimed and re-seeded by the Verderers in 1959
under the provisions of the New Forest Act, 1949.
Whilst the numbers
of cattle and ponies depastured on the Forest in recent years
compares favourably with those of the 1880s, the actual number of
commoners exercising their grazing rights is now considerably
smaller. The cottager with his tiny holding and a few cows and
heifers on the Forest has by and large disappeared. Many such
holdings have become desirable residences for the retired and for
the commuter to nearby urban areas, whilst others have been
absorbed into rather larger units. Particularly since the 1940s,
there has been a general trend towards the aggregation of holdings
into larger units. The size of most agricultural holdings in the
Forest area (excluding the inherently large farms in the area),
however, remains less than fifty acres and a large number are a
good deal smaller. Many of these holdings today have a central
'core' of meadows, with one or two other fields at a distance from
the holding proper. In the event of the death or retirement of the
owner the holding may be passed on intact, the outlying fields sold
off, or the farm broken up between a number of others. The process
of aggregation is a gradual one.
The most readily
discernible factors in the depletion of the fauna and flora of the
Lowland zone of Britain since the beginning of the eighteenth
century have been the progressive reclamation of its tracts of
unsown, or semi-natural, vegetation and the intensification of
agricultural use and techniques. It is tempting to return to part
of the quotation from Macaulay with which the previous chapter
began: 'It seems highly probable that a fourth part of England has
been, in the course of little more than a century, turned from a
wild into a garden.' In the century since that was written demands
on the land for agriculture, silviculture and urban and industrial
development have grown apace. The wild has become yet
smaller.
The heathlands which
are so essential a feature of the New Forest today, were formerly
part of a broad belt which extended across the Hampshire Basin from
Southampton Water nearby, as far west as Dorchester, broken only by
the valleys of the Avon, Stour and Frome. The heaths of Dorset and
those of Hampshire west of the Avon, Moore were reduced in area
from about 75,000 acres in 1811 to about 25,000 acres in 1960, and
that this reduction had been accompanied by fragmentation into more
than one hundred separate parcels.
Urban and industrial
expansion, radiating from Bournemouth— itself built on what
was formerly Poole Heath—and other towns, together with
extensive conifer afforestation and reclamation for agriculture,
has left few extensive areas west of the New Forest. Many of the
fragments which remain have become subject to greatly increased
human disturbance, and in some cases to extensive scots pine
colonisation arising from the seed sources provided by the
plantations. Many hundreds of acres of heathland have disappeared
since the 1960s.
These changes are
fairly typical of those proceeding elsewhere on heathlands in
Lowland Britain. Moore estimated that since the early nineteenth
century the heaths of Breckland in East Anglia had been reduced in
area by upwards of seventy-five per cent and those of North
Hampshire and Surrey by between fifty and seventy-five per cent.
The trend is continuing, and it seems likely that within another
decade only numbers of isolated fragments of heath will remain in
the south and west of England outside the New Forest.
The amount of space
any individual species requires in order to survive indefinitely in
a given part of its range is in most cases uncertain, but it would
be fair to say that the smaller the individual area of habitat and
thus the smaller the population, the more vulnerable a species
becomes. Moore showed that in Dorset, the smaller and more isolated
the area of heath, the smaller the number of species it carried. It
is likely that many, if not most, of the remaining fragments of
heathland in southern and eastern England outside the New Forest
are too small to indefinitely support many of their characteristic
animals and plants. The situation will be further aggravated as the
reduction and fragmentation of the heaths continues. The New Forest
is, therefore, ecologically important as the one area in which the
most complete spectrum of heathland fauna stands the best chance of
survival. To some extent it may also function as a 'reservoir' from
which re-colonisation of smaller, less viable sites may
periodically take place.
The unenclosed
woodlands of the Forest are of not dissimilar significance. Uneven
aged deciduous woodland working on a more or less natural rotation
is now of very limited distribution in Lowland Britain. There has
been widespread conversion of deciduous woodland to conifers in the
present century, and in any case the economic management of
hardwoods does not allow for the development of a wide range of
age-classes and the retention of the mature, senile and decaying
timber which is such a feature of the Forest woods and with which
is associated their exceptionally rich invertebrate and bird
fauna.
Three other factors
are of importance in considering the faunistic variety of the
Forest.
First it is a fact
that the widest range of animal species tends to occur at habitat
boundaries—the bird population at a woodland edge, for
example, is larger and more varied than in the wood itself. At the
same time many species require combinations of habitats—the
curlew, for example, requires both dry heath (for nesting) and bog
(for feeding) on its breeding grounds. Great diversity of habitat
over short distances is a characteristic ecological feature of the
Forest: woodland, dry heath, acid grassland, gorse brake, wet heath
and valley bog, form a complex pattern within small areas. The
result is an abundance of habitat boundaries and combinations of
habitats in close proximity which contributes significantly to the
overall diversity of the Forest's fauna.
Second, the Crown
lands have never been used for large scale game rearing and to this
negative factor can be attributed the survival of a large and
varied population of predatory birds—a feature now rare in
Lowland Britain and indeed over much of the countryside around the
Forest.
The third factor is
also a negative one—the area is little affected by the use of
toxic insecticides or by stream pollution.
The hypothesis that
the New Forest offers the best chance of survival in Lowland
Britain to the most complete spectrum of heathland fauna may be
examined by taking a number of 'indicator' species and comparing
their status there with that on other remaining heathlands in the
Lowland zone. In this connexion, of twelve indicator species,
between them representing a wide variety of animals from a wide
range of heathland habitats, most, if not all twelve, occur or have
occurred in the past in other habitats besides heathland, but it
would be fair to say that the heaths have always been their main
stronghold in the sense that there the populations have always been
densest. This is certainly true today, and combination of
mixed grazing and forestry, which exists in the framework of the
Forest as an important tourist attraction, presents great
challenges to integrated management for sustainable
ecosystems.
