ARCHAEOLOGY AND LAND-USE HISTORY
by OLIVER RACKHAM
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
(This paper commemorates the bicentenary of John Chapman's and Peter
Andre's A map of the County of Essex, which includes the earliest large-scale
map of the Forest (Fig. 10).)
Many books have been written about Epping Forest, but there is no
systematic interpretation of its archives in terms of practical land-uses or of the
details of the Forest on the ground. The Forest's history is the subject of many
popular errors; the documentation has been mingled with legends, forgeries,
and misinterpretations repeated from author to author. Since the change of
constitution in 1878, the traditional land-uses have declined or been suppressed
and the historical features have fallen into decay; opportunities of reconstruct-
ing the genuine history diminish year by year.
A century ago E. N. Buxton, whose knowledge of the Forest has never been
surpassed, wrote:
The forest, as we know it, is probably but little altered in character from
the time of the Druids, but its boundaries are sadly curtailed. (4)
This paper is a first and necessarily very incomplete attempt to re-examine this
opinion. It turns out that the boundaries of the Forest are not much curtailed,
but its character has been altered twice, once with the rise of the wood-pasture
system probably in Anglo-Saxon times, and again with its decline in Buxton's
own day.
INTRODUCTION
What is a Forest?
A Forest, in the earliest English sense of the word, means a tract of land
where special bye-laws operated which were ostensibly concerned with
protecting deer belonging to the king (or less often to some other magnate). The
word and the idea were introduced by William the Conqueror and are first
heard of in Domesday Book. As with our National Parks, the term does not
imply any particular land-use: the boundaries were not marked on the ground,
and within them were the farmland, roads, villages, and hamlets of the ordinary
countryside, as well as towns like Waltham Abbey and Epping.
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