colonizing glades and the edges of plains during recessions of grazing (there are
many examples in the Forest at present). Both species of oak are present; the
greater abundance of Quercus robur in the Forest — in contrast to Q. petraea
which usually predominates in woods on similar sites — is probably because
grazing favours robur (40). The records do not distinguish between the two
oaks.
Hornbeam, having few or no specific uses and easily confused with other
trees, is seldom recorded in place-names or medieval documents. For many
centuries it has been the commonest woodland and wood-pasture tree in south
Essex. Its earliest record in the Forests is in the survey of 1544, by which time it
was certainly as common as it is now.
Beech has sometimes been thought an anomaly in the Forest, because of
the popular myth that it is peculiarly a tree of the chalk-lands. There can be no
doubt that it was common on high ground in medieval Epping Forest. In 1612,
as we have seen, there were ancient beeches in Loughton, and beech was felled
in Monk Wood in 1582; there is a record for the Waltham sector in 1489 (64).
Its further antiquity is attested by the Anglo-Saxon place-names Buckhurst Hill
(Bochirst "beech-grove" 1135 (45)) and Beachet Wood in Theydon Mount
(bece "beech" + -ett "stand of trees"). The newly-discovered pollen record
takes beech, like hornbeam, further back into Anglo-Saxon times.
Beech is never explicitly recorded for Hainault Forest. In 1544 a division of
the Forest was called Beche hill, but only oaks and hornbeams were recorded for
it, and the derivation is uncertain (cf High Beech alias High Beach in Epping
Forest). There are, however, explicit early records of beech from several other
places in S. and E. Essex, as at Writtle from 1396 onwards. All these, like the
majority of medieval records of beech (40), are on very acidic sands and gravels
or occasionally on clays. Far from being an anomaly, the Epping beeches are the
one remnant of the native distribution of the tree in Essex.
The lesser trees — holly, hawthorn, blackthorn, crab-apple, service — are
well recorded, possibly because they were thought to provide food for deer: in
the later centuries it was apparently supposed that they alone constituted
"vert" under Forest Law. In 1304 John Miller lost 6s 7d worth of cart and
horses for taking by night a load of wild apples and service-trees (de pomeriis
silvestribus et de lignis seriis (?mistranscription of servis)) (58). The 1544 and
1565 Hainault surveys mention "blake Thorne" and "thornes". The 1582
account of Monk Wood mentions 618 crabtrees and hawthorns and two hollies
in 86 modern acres. Hawthorn, Crabtree, and holly are referred to in 1634;
maple, "servis", and holly in 1656 (24). Little use seems to have been made of
these trees for feeding deer. Crabapples could be a danger: the casualties of
1496 in Hainault included a hart "choked with a doildyng (mistranscription of
"wildyng", another name for the Crabtree)" and a stag (i.e. a young hart)
"choked with a crabbe" (67).
The boundary hedges of the Forests are often like those of the adjoining
farmland, containing palatable trees rare in the Forest itself. The six ash
pollards in the surviving old boundary of Hainault Forest are an example. Elms
of the Ulmus carpinifolia and U. procera groups, the commonest trees of the
50