EARTHWORKS, ROADS AND BUILDINGS
Epping Forest contains rather few earthworks for its size. Ambresbury
Banks and Loughton Camp have already been mentioned.
Not being a wood or a park, the Forest has no boundary bank. With the
possible exception of the "Purlieu Bank" at Epping, where the legal and
physical boundaries coincided (61), its original perimeter is marked only by the
hedgebanks of the adjoining fields. Being an uncompartmented Forest, in
which cattle and deer could wander anywhere under the pollards, it is not
divided into woods by internal banks as are compartmented Forests like
Hatfield and Writtle where coppicing was practised.
Near the King's Oak Inn are nine rectangular mounds each measuring
some 50-100 by 30 ft. They are of the type known as "pillow mounds" made for
the purpose of having rabbits burrow into them. In 1632 the huge fine of £33 6s
8d was imposed under Forest Law for a "coney burrow" (24).
The ponds appear to be mainly artificial, often formed by damming
streams. Their purpose and date are uncertain. The earliest reference is to a
"Hungpoole" in Chingford in 1475 (19).
Epping Forest has long been intersected by roads. The c.1590 view shows
the "London Way from Eppinge" along roughly the line of the present minor
road via High Beach. Other roads appear on the c. 1640 map.
From early times the Forest has been noted for highwaymen and criminals.
In 1237 Henry III sent a stern letter to the county authorities ordering them to
bring to justice the itinerant malefactors frequenting the king's woods in Essex
(6). The first murder recorded in Epping Forest was in c.1248 (64). A relic of
this state of affairs is the road from Loughton to the Wake Arms, which is
bordered on both sides by a narrow clearing clearly shown on Chapman &
Andre's map and despite a hundred years or more of neglect still visible on the
ground. For about 130 ft on each side of the road there is a strip of scrub lacking
pollards or other old trees; it is demarcated from the dense pollards behind by a
row of ancient beech stools, up to 16 ft diameter, and hollies. A statute of 1285
ordered that clearings 200 ft wide be made alongside roads past woods to
protect travellers from gangsters lurking in the bushes; such "trenches" are still
to be seen in places (39).
Epping and Hainault Forests both had lodges; that in Epping survived
until recently (see later). "Queen Elizabeth's Lodge" was not originally a lodge
but one of two "standings" or observation towers. No Forest was complete
without a hermit: a chapel was founded in Hainault in 1438 by the pious Henry
VI, on the lines of the hermitage set up 300 years earlier in Writtle Forest (63).
HISTORY OF VEGETATION
In wood-pasture there is a conflict of interest between the deer, cattle, and
sheep and the trees. The more trees there are, the less abundant and the worse
will be the pasture, and the more animals graze the pasture, the more difficult it
48