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Book Review
| Forests and Chases of England and Wales c. 1500 − c.1850: Towards a Survey and Analysis. Edited by John Langdon and Graham Jones. Oxford: St John's College Research Centre, 2005. xviii + 118pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index. £25 paperback.
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| In 2005 St. John's College, Oxford, celebrated its 450th anniversary. At the time the college was founded the forests and chases in England and Wales comprised freely accessed common wasteland and woodland which, for the next three centuries, played many pivotal roles in the lives of different segments of the population. For example, they were important in the lives of royalty and aristocrats for recreational activities, notably hunting; for the common classes (peasantry) in the provision of livelihoods through grazing, hunting, and fuel acquisition; and in general terms as social foci subject to management and political control and influence. A holistic understanding of their geography in space and over the subsequent 350 years, until the industrialization process asserted the dominance of the urban over the rural, can at best be described as piecemeal. This is partly because there have been and continue to be many interested parties: ecologists, archaeologists, historians, geographers, sociologists, economists and partly because there has been no systematic attempt to draw all these parties together within a coordinated research program. |
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Langdon and Jones, with support from St. John's College, set about addressing this problem by organizing a three-day forum during which a synthesis of research was presented and with the objective of producing a multi-disciplinary grant application to the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. The latter, unfortunately, failed to achieve funding, but the papers and debate of the forum live on in this edited volume. The seventeen chapters attest to the diversity of the subject. Many relate to studies on the mapping and surveys of forests and chases which were most numerous in South Wales, the England-Wales borderlands, northwest England and south central England. Other chapters examine mainstream socio-economic aspects, such as woodland fuel and hunting, and less obvious topics such as gypsies and travelers, religious dissidence, and crime. Additional topics include access rights, charities and their ownership of gifted land and control of its income, land management, and local court assemblies (known as swanimotes and woodmotes), by which decisions about local issues were taken (i.e. they represent some of the oldest English forums for local self-determination). The foci of remaining chapters are individual forests/chases such as the Forest of Dean, a Crown forest with a variety of uses including mining, metallurgy, wood products, and animal husbandry, and thus a multitude of interested parties and complex rights issues; chapters on Bringewood Chase and Rockingham Forest juxtapose history and modern methods of data presentation and analysis including GIS in the former and a digital atlas of the latter. |
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This is a valuable synthesis of information on vital people—resource- environment relationships in the immediate pre-industrial era. The book is well produced and illustrated. It would have been all the better if the grant application had succeeded but better this legacy than no legacy. |
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Formerly senior lecturer, now honorary fellow at the Univerity of Reading, A. M. Mannion has written eight books, the latest being Carbon and Its Domestication (Springer, 2006). |
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