Tabor (1987) indicates that by 1982 there were over 200 young standards in Shadwell Wood,
each of which was a 2 ft. sucker shoot when the wood was last felled 60 or more years previously
and at every felling of coppice the elms encroached a little more from the boundary.
The elms involved as timber trees seem to be elms of the Ulmus minor group, Lineage Elms
or, more rarely, Ulmus procera, presumably U. minor and U. procera because they do not
readily coppice. The space occupied by an elm could probably be better used for growing Oak,
a more valuable timber, or even Ash. Oliver Rackham (pers. comm.) has two 17th century
records of elm as timber trees from West Thurrock (Vineyard) 1677 and South Ockendon (North
Heath Wood, Belhus Park) 1656.
2) Forests
A Forest, in its legal sense, is an area of land over which the Forest laws had jurisdiction, the
laws being principally concerned with the protection of the deer. The legal Forest was often
centred on a tract of common land (the physical Forest) where commoners had certain grazing
and woodcutting rights, but the boundaries of the legal Forest also extended over farmland and
even towns and villages. It is important to recognise this distinction when referring to elms.
Persistent browsing by livestock of palatable elm in the physical Forest would invariably curtail
the spread of these trees; within the legal Forest elm can occur in abundance in the hedgerows
of the farmland. There were six Royal Forests in Essex, of which five are important to this
study: Hainault, Epping and Wintry in the south-west of the county; Hatfield, near Bishops
Stortford, and Writtle, near Chelmsford. Epping and Hainault are uncompartmented wood-pas-
tures with pollards. Hatfield and Writtle are compartmented Forests with protected areas of
coppiced woodland (Rackham, 1980).
Elm is practically non-existent in what remains of Hainault Forest, and is rather infrequent
in most of Epping Forest. In these two Forests cattle were unrestricted in where they could
graze and being for the most part on acid soils were not suitable for elms. Writtle and Hatfield,
with protected compartments, are more suited to elms, but Writtle is probably less suitable for
elms because of the preponderance of hornbeam and, again, acid soils (Rackham, 1988).
Hatfield compartmented and on chalky boulder clay has a good complement of elms. It is
probably only in the last hundred years, with declining browsing/grazing pressure, that elm has
become more frequent in Epping Forest.
Hatfield Forest
Wych Elm has only been found once in Hatfield Forest, in Street Coppice. A few clones of
English Elm have been found scattered over the Forest. As expected a few Hybrid Elms are
present; East Anglian Elms predominate.
The following paragraphs are taken from Oliver Rackham's book 'The Last Forest',
published in 1988 -
'East Anglian elms are innumerable 'species' as different from each other in
appearance as any deciduous trees can be; some are spread over an area of several
miles, but in other places a single parish, or part of a parish, may have its own
unique elm. The late R. H. Richens made a study of Essex elms, although even
his painstaking analysis only began to do them justice.
One of the most distinctive East Anglian elms in the Forest is the clone in the
east of Spittlemore Coppice, which when full-grown is a massively rugged tree
with down-arching boughs and great bosses on the bark - a black-poplar-like elm.
Similar elms stand half-a-mile west of Hatfield town. In the south of the same
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