In the 1690s Gregory
King estimated that there were only three million acres of
cultivated woodland left (about 8 per cent of England and Wales)
and another three million of forests, parks and commons. And the
contraction was still going on. There was hardly a county in the
kingdom, thought a contemporary in 1764, where one would not find
places called 'forest', 'grove' or 'park' which were now arable or
pasture or bare heath. In the 1790s, when John Byng sat down to
list the changes which had occurred in England since the
seventeenth century, he put high on his list the further erosion of
the old woods. By 1800 there were no more than two million acres of
woodland in England and Wales, and by the beginning of the
twentieth century the percentage of the United Kingdom occupied by
woodland (4 per cent) would be the lowest in Europe.
To many, this
development symbolized the triumph of civilization. Forests had
originally been synonymous with wildness and danger, as the word
'savage' (from silva, a wood) reminds us. Early man, it has
been plausibly suggested, preferred open country to woodland
because it was safer: he could see what was coming and guard
against it in advance. When Elizabethans spoke of a
'wilderness' they meant not a barren waste, but a dense,
uncultivated wood, like Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, 'a desert
inaccessible under the shade of melancholy boughs'.
A
mid-seventeenth-century poetical dictionary suggests as appropriate
epithets for a forest: 'dreadful', 'gloomy', 'wild', 'desert',
'uncouth', 'melancholy', 'unpeopled' and 'beast- haunted'. In
New England, Plymouth Colony was founded in a 'hideous and desolate
wilderness ... full of wild beasts and wild men ... and the whole
country full of woods and thickets'. The colonists were aghast at
the sight of a countryside covered by 'wild and uncouth woods'; and
they set about destroying trees so as to make 'habitable' what
Cotton Mather regarded as 'dismal thickets'. Only 'wild creatures'
they thought, would 'ordinarily love the liberty of the woods'. Old
England, explained the Elizabethan lawyer John Mariwood, had also
originally been 'a wilderness', but the early inhabitants had
destroyed 'the woods and great thickets' near places of human
habitation so that they would provide no shelter for dangerous wild
animals: 'by that means the wild beasts were all driven to resort
to those places where the woods were left remaining to make their
abode in them ... so that... the first beginning of forest in
England was propter defectum inhabitants populi, for want of
people to inhabit those vacant places wherein wild beasts
were.'
The woods,
therefore, were homes for animals, not men. Hence the poet William
Browne could describe wild beasts as 'forest citizens'. Hence also
the assumption that any men who lived in the woods must be rough
and barbarous. The first human beings, it was widely believed, were
'woodland men', homines sylvestres. The progress of mankind
was from the forest to the field. The ancient Britons, thought the
eighteenth- century antiquary John Woodward, were barbarous and
savage and their towns were 'groves and thickets', surrounded by a
hedge or ditch. The Irish, said an Elizabethan,
remained 'wood-born savages', while John Locke contrasted the
'civil and rational' inhabitants of cities with the 'irrational,
untaught' denizens of 'woods and forests'. The ancient Hindus,
thought Edmund Burke in 1783, had developed a civilization
possessing 'all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in
the woods'. Only by being drawn out of forests would men be led to
civility.
Untamed woodjands
were thus seen as obstac Literary convention as well as actual
experience thus underlay the seventeenth-century commonplace that
forest-dwellers tended to be lawless squatters, poverty-stricken,
stubborn and uncivil. But it was undeniable that the woodland areas
really did contain cabins erected by beggarly people, who had gone
in search of space, or employment in the charcoal industry, and had
squatted illegally, often free from the normal social restraints of
church and manor courts, and subsisting by pilfering timber and
game. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would see many
bitter disputes between forest-dwellers and the officials of the
Crown and the larger landlords, who tried to impose more efficient
control upon the resources and inhabitants of the forest areas.
Competing claims to land use led to mutual hostility and
misunderstanding; and it is not surprising that those concerned to
maintain the social hierarchy disliked woodlands as potential black
spots: the forest, said the agriculturalist Charles Vancouver in
1813, was a 'nest and conservatory of sloth, idleness and
misery'.
As well as being the
scene of protracted social conflict, the forests were also disliked
because they provided a refuge for outlaws and a base for dangerous
criminals. Selwood Forest, for example, was a notorious haunt of
bandits and coiners until Thomas, Viscount Wey-mouth, built a
church there in 1712 and began to cut the woods down. Cranborne
Chase harboured smugglers and deer-stealers; and many other forest
areas had a similar reputation. Even clumps of trees on the
roadside were disliked because they provided a hiding-place for
robbers. Fulbrook in Warwickshire had once been a safe route for
travellers, lamented the fifteenth-century historian John Rous, but
when it was imparked by its noble owner the hedges and pales
provided shelter for dangerous thieves.
