Most Forests were centred on a large tract of common-land where the deer
generally lived and to which the Forest name eventually came to be transferred.
It is important not to confuse the "legal" Forest (over which the Forest Law had
jurisdiction) with the "physical" Forest (that part of it which was not farmland,
private woodland, or built-up) or with later meanings of forest which have to do
with trees.
Forests, in the physical sense, were commons, grazed by the livestock of
commoners; they differed from other commons in being grazed by the king's
deer as well. Many Forests, like other large commons, were wooded (Exmoor is
an example of a woodless Forest) and thus belonged to the land-use known as
wood-pasture (39), involving both trees and grazing animals. Forests were not
fenced, relying on force of habit to retain the deer, and thus differ from parks
(also wood-pasture, but private and fenced to keep the deer in) and woods
(fenced to keep deer and other stock out). All these distinctions are first ex-
pressly recorded in Domesday Book.
The management of trees
The management of trees in the middle ages was a long-established,
systematic, and conservative art (39). A normal wood was managed by cop-
picing: the majority of the trees, called the underwood, were felled to near
ground level every few years and allowed to grow again from the stump or stool
to yield an indefinite succession of crops of poles, used for fuel and many other
purposes. Scattered among the underwood were timber trees, usually oaks,
allowed to stand for longer periods and then felled to yield structural timber. In
wood-pasture, because grazing animals would eat the regrowth of coppice, it
was usual instead to manage trees by pollarding, otherwise called lopping: they
were cut at 6-10ft above ground, leaving a permanent base called a boiling,
from which successive crops of poles would sprout at a height which cattle and
deer could not reach. A rare alternative was shredding, cutting the branches off
a tree leaving a tuft at the top, in the expectation that they would grow again.
Epping Forest contains several thousand pollards, not cut since 1878, but only a
few stools. Pollarding is more difficult and laborious than coppicing (I have
done a lot of both). Axes and ladders don't go well together. There is a myth
that pollards in Epping were cut by a man standing at ground level and wielding
an axe at arm's length, but no-one should repeat this story without first putting
on a good helmet and trying it for half a day!
It must be emphasized that the traditional management of woods and
Forests does not involve planting trees. In Epping Forest, most of the trees are
pollards, which if regularly cut are long-lived. Replacement from self-sown
saplings has been more than adequate throughout the Forest's history.
Following traditional usage, I shall restrict the word timber to the trunks of
trees large enough for structural carpentry or sawing into plank. Coppice and
pollard poles, branches of trees felled for timber, and boilings felled for
firewood will be collectively called wood.
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