Myths of the Forest

Tim Little & Pete Byfield

It’s a well-known fact that most of the older trees in Epping Forest are pollards. Stretching back into Anglo-Saxon times, pollarding was universal under a system that has been called wood-pasture. Fuel wood was lopped, supposedly on a cycle of around 14 years, well out of reach from cattle and deer grazing on the rough pasture below. Before this regime became established, the Forest was lime wildwood.

When the Corporation of London became responsible for the Forest in 1878, they promptly suppressed all further pollarding and went on to thin many ‘mops on sticks’ with the ambition of achieving, eventually, a ‘proper’ forest of regular trees; naturalists and forest managers alike regarded pollards with distain. But then, a hundred years later, at a pioneering and persuasive conference held in the new Field Study Centre at High Beach, a fresh generation of naturalists proclaimed that pollarding was an essential prerequisite for restoring the Forest’s fast-falling biodiversity.

A display panel from the Epping Forest Information Centre (above) sums up the current Received Wisdom - coppicing in Epping Forest was, at most, a marginal activity. Pollarding prevailed.

For some years, the Corporation of London studiously ignored these claims until, eventually, they saw the light. After a few false starts, when veteran beech were given perfunctory and often fatal military haircuts, arboricultural science has prevailed. As such, the Corporation has carried out a careful program of wood-pasture restoration, accelerated of late by substantial Lottery funding. This is now one of the largest and most ambitious habitat restoration programs in the country. While celebrating the achievement, this paper suggests a few quibbles with the underlying history.

These can be summarised as follows:

1. Pollarding in Epping Forest on a substantial scale was a Tudor innovation. Coppicing was normal until coal, legislation promoting longer coppice enclosures and the decline of royal forest institutions brought about gradual change. Even so, large parts of the Forest were routinely coppiced well into Victorian times. 2. Provision of browse for deer and cattle was a primary purpose of royal forest management, along with the production of fuel wood. This was achieved by the disciplined enclosure of coppices after cutting, followed by access for cattle when the springwood became sufficiently robust. Live browse in the form of leaves and buds complimented rough grazing outside the coppices and rich lammas meadows in the river valleys below. 3. Epping Forest was deliberately re-stocked with beech and hornbeam in the early Roman period to sustain Londinium’s fuel requirements. Today’s legacy of complex multi-stemmed clonal groups is the result of coppicing these planted trees over many centuries 4. The notion that pre-Roman Epping Forest Tilia cordata represents ‘wildwood’ is highly improbable.

Reasons for Revising Epping Forest History

Leaves on The Trees

For folk fascinated by woodland history, but appalled at prospects of deciphering hieroglyphs on remnants of dead sheep in silent, sunless rooms, there’s good news. The most useful piece of historical research in relation to Epping Forest is a pleasant stroll through picturesque beech woods on sunny days in springtime; accompanying dogs, human friends and picnics are optional. All that’s needed is observation.

Epping Forest beech trees change from winter senescence to full summer leaf at different times. The transition itself is a matter of a few days, depending on the weather, but individual trees have widely varied start times. During the past three years commencement of ‘leaf break’ has varied from mid- March and on into early May.

Synchronous leaf-break tends to be clustered and these clusters stand out in sharp distinction to others around. There can be coincidence whereby adjacent clusters happen to be at almost the same stage, but absolute synchronisation is quite exceptional. Very quickly, it’s possible to establish a close link between synchronous leaf break and proximity of the kind that might be expected from former coppice stools.

Left: Leaf Break on one small multi-stemmed cluster well ahead of neighbours. Right: Subtle nuances of green suggest separate clonal groups.

There are, literally, thousands of these clusters to be found in Epping Forest and the only likely explanation, in all but a small percentage of aberrant examples, is genetically identical clonal groups. This congruence between clusters of multi-stemmed beech, synchronous leaf break and single genetic identity has been confirmed by Tim Little. DNA was extracted from dormant buds on a large potential beech stool near Dulsmead Hollow; a typical community of ancient beech. Analysis using microsatellite markers enabled the identification of multiple stems as clonal. For ease this specimen was affectionately named “Belinda”.

The reason for emphasising a personal presence is the difficulty of capturing on camera what’s obvious to the naked eye. It’s easy to stand in the centre of these clusters and take an upward canopy shot, but although this will, almost invariably, show surrounding stems at the same leaf- break stage, this doesn’t depict the sharp contrast with surrounding clusters. Once again, Tim Little has organised overhead pictures using a drone; they portray the situation to perfection.

In our opinion, the only probable explanation for this phenomenon is that the multi-stemmed clonal groups are derived from ancient coppice stools. Typically, the stools vary from 3 to 6 meters at their longest diameter; there’s a tendency towards a lozenge shape rather than a circle but this isn’t invariable. There are numerous instances of what we’ve termed ‘elephants feet’ around the base of some single-stemmed trees and there are many more to be found in and around large clonal groups. We believe these are derived from thinning and ‘storing’ operations carried out by the Corporation’s earliest conservation programme. Many single beech trees exhibit epicormic growth of a kind rarely, if ever, seen in maiden trees.

Various alternative theories, other than derivation from ancient coppice stools, have been put forward to explain the multi-stemmed beech in Epping Forest. One young researcher, Rosy Mansfield, proposed fairies as a causal mechanism but she has now revoked this promising theory. ‘Bundle planting’ was advocated until recently, but this doesn’t stand up against synchronous leaf- break. Very recently, some expert opinion has suggested clonal groups created by individual veteran trees that have expanded via suckers or self-layering growth habits; while admitting that layering is theoretically possible in exceptional cases, we don’t believe such explanations are consistent with the sheer number of clonal clusters, their distribution or the separate archival evidence for ancient Epping Forest management.

Left: An exceptionally early leaf break at Dulsmead Hollow; surrounding clusters still dormant. Right: A drone shot

of “Belinda”, the multi-stemmed cluster at Dulsmead Hollow used for DNA analysis.

Above: This is “Belinda” (see above right) at ground level. DNA analysis suggests these stems constitute a single genetic individual.

Thinning Mops on Sticks

In the early 1880’s, the Conservators embarked on a vast programme of thinning the ‘mops on sticks’ they had inherited under the 1878 Epping Forest Act. The instigators were Thomas Fowell Buxton and Edward Buxton, with energy and impetus from the second Forest superintendent, Major Alexander McKenzie. In the mid-1890’s, it was suggested that a quarter million trees had been felled, and this wasn’t disputed at the time. The programme tapered off into the new century, but wood gangs were still doing less systematic thinning in the 1970’s.

After a torrent of criticism in press and at public meetings, early thinning was moderated and divided into successive stages; most parts of the Forest received three visitations in the 19thC. Hornbeam were a special target and the survival rate for multi-stemmed hornbeam is considerably lower than beech. The Conservators were concerned that these ‘mutants’ not only inhibited ‘healthy new growth’ but also harboured disease. Beech didn’t escape the attention of Major McKenzie and his men, but thinning was more constrained.

The overall ambition of thinning was to eradicate the worst excesses of former lopping and provide a long-term framework for a ‘proper’ high canopy forest without blemish in the future. For a while, the Conservators had the opposition of the Essex Field Club, but there emerged a consensus between Conservators and Naturalists, based entirely on aesthetic grounds.

Left: An exceptional hornbeam stool that escaped “storing” (singling) by the early Conservators; proximity to Ching Brook probably preserved it. Right: “Elephants Feet” legacy of former thinning and subsequent browse suppression.

Boundaries

Epping Forest is a recent innovation; the name wasn’t recorded until the 17thC. By then, what we know as Epping Forest was half of Waltham Forest; the other half being Hainault Forest, on the east side of the River Roding. Waltham Forest was a single legal entity; although sub-divided into smaller parcels known as ‘Walks’, there was only one Verderers Court. This Waltham Forest shouldn’t be confused with the modern London Borough of that name!

Neither should be confused with another Waltham Forest that existed up until Forest reorganisation in the 15thC. In medieval times, what became Waltham Forest was administered as three distinct and separate legal entities, corresponding to the Hundred boundaries of that time. They were

Waltham Forest, Becontree and Ongar. Each of them had their own Verderers Court and most of the other paraphernalia of a medieval royal forest – juries, regarders, agisters, court stewards and a tribe of other officials who may, or may not, have done useful things. The only apparent exception was that The Forest of Waltham, by far the smallest, seems in practise to have shared the offices of ‘Regarder’ with Ongar.

The boundary between Becontree to the south and Ongar and Waltham to the north was more than one of jurisdiction: there were practical differences and some of these are still apparent. There are no ancient beech trees in Becontree, on either side of the Roding. While the right of commoners to cut wood was universal in Ongar, in Becontree west of the Roding we haven’t encountered any. and east of the Roding they were commuted to fixed assignments. In West Ham, Wanstead, Woodford, Leyton & Walthamstow (Becontree west of the Roding) coppices were larger and more pronounced – many acquired formal straight woodbanks; sheep grazing was more extensive and the intervening plains larger. In Sewardstone, Waltham Holy Cross, Loughton, Theydon Bois and Epping (to the north) coppices were more extensive but less formal. Chingford was an exception: although within Waltham Hundred, it had neither ancient beech nor formal rights of estover. There are separate grounds for thinking Chingford was railroaded into Waltham at a late stage, after the Conquest.

These three medieval Forest boundaries were probably established in Anglo-Saxon times, but there are enigmatic traces of another, underlying palimpsest. This suggests that the Epping Forest manors along the Lea Valley north of Walthamstow were once conjoined with territories west of the river. There are hints of similar river valley autonomy along the Roding Valley. This would help account for the existence of two separate Iron Age encampments, Amesbury Banks and Loughton Camp, within Epping Forest. They have been interpreted as refugees for people and cattle in times of stress rather than nodes of political power and they lie on opposite sides of the Hundred boundary that ran through the Forest separating Waltham from Ongar. This would point to river-valley communities sharing woodland resources on the upland.

This interpretation militates against the idea of lime ‘wildwood’ in the immediate pre-Roman era, and also suggests some economic symbiosis between valley and ‘forest’. The suggestion put forward here is that limewood provided the ropes and nets for communities engaged in fishing and coppice fodder to compliment the rich Lammas meadow resources of the river valley. Contrary to many other statements, lime coppice - as opposed to lime seedlings – can be remarkably robust against browsing animals. And although lime coppice only reaches the point of flowering on long rotations, no sensible Neolithic citizens would miss out on a superb source of honey by failing to ‘store’ a few trees!

In theory there was a time when the River Lea was an international boundary; the line between King Alfred’s England and the Viking Danelaw, which supposedly ran along the river for a time. If this is true, it might conceivably have been strong enough to split older communities that once straddled the valley. But not much else. Relations between St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London and their several ancient manorial holdings in Essex, and the similarly ancient lands held by the Nuns of Barking west of the Lea were remarkably untroubled by any hint of international conflict!

The Forest of Essex

As a strictly legal entity – and as a special zone for the exercise of royal prerogative in raising archaic revenues – the Royal Forest of Essex covered most of the county at one time or another. County landowners waged a centuries-long battle to push back the boundaries and when a cash-strapped Charles I pushed back, he triggered a catastrophic sequence that culminated in Civil War. The areas

6 where forest law was usefully applied to the management of physical forest were fragmented and much smaller. This included the largest part, eventually known as Epping and Hainault Forest but administered as Waltham Forest.

Most of the Forest of Essex was a mythical forest and to compound the conundrum, a part of Essex never included within this legal fiction was densely wooded. This area was the subject of Oliver Rackham’s ‘The Woods of South East Essex’ and lies to the east of modern Basildon, between the Thames and Crouch.

These woods outside the ‘Royal Forest’ are suggestive of the Kentish dens described by Alan Everitt. Individual manors shared good grasslands that stretched around the coast from Canvey Island to the Crouch estuary but the upland woods, like the Wealden ‘dens’, are balkanised into separate parts, held by individual manors. Many of the woods are ‘detached’: the manor that owns them being several miles away. In at least one instance, many miles away – a portion of Southend Great Wood seems to have been part of Barnes in south west London.

Something of the sort prevailed to the west, in Middlesex and what became Hertfordshire – but on a larger scale. Anyone looking for the Domesday woodland that was part of the Bishop of London’s Stepney manor in the East End can still find significant fragments such as Queen’s Wood and Coldfall, but they’re miles away, up on the heights of Middlesex. The Bishop’s manor of Fulham was well endowed with woodland, but it was up at Finchley. And romantic North London destinations such as Harlesden, Neasden and Willesden owe their names to former lives as detached woodland dens of the St Paul’s prebendary estate that clustered around the walls of the old Roman city.

The Forest of Essex was different. In parts such as Tiptree, Laindon, Hatfield Forest, and what became Epping and Hainault Forests there were no permanent internal boundaries against commoners animals. Rights to cut wood were strictly manorial, but grazing and browsing rights were ubiquitous; in Epping Forest they were shared by 26 separate manors. This ‘intercommoning’ was the salvation of Epping Forest, enabling the Corporation of London, with land in Wanstead, to fight enclosures throughout.

Whether rights to cut wood were vested in individuals, institutions or the local community, coppice coupes that were enclosed for felling had to re-opened after a specific period to enable any animals, regardless of where they came from, to enter. The customary period of coppice enclosure in all royal forests was standardised by statute in 1483 at 3 years. And extended in stages thereafter.

The management of intercommoning and the preservation of coppice browse is what Royal Forests were all about. Of course, the preservation of deer and royal hunting rights were an important feature and virtually all judgements made in forest courts used formulae that made some reference to royal prerogative. But in large measure, this was part of a legal ritual. In much the same way that the policeman of a generation ago depended heavily on abstract notions such as ‘Obstructing the Queen’s Highway’ or ‘A Breach of the Queen’s Peace’; this didn’t mean Her Majesty was about to pay a visit. The Forest Courts at every level were endlessly preoccupied with the preservation of ‘vert’ and ‘covert’ and this was ostensibly for the benefit of the king’s deer, but the principal beneficiaries of well-administered forest law and discipline were all those who used the forest. The system couldn’t have worked for long without it.

Some say the Forest of Essex dates back to the 12thC, but there are hints of an older origin. Verderers, for example, were elected by the freeholders of the county in a similar way to coroners and both seem to be pre-Norman institutions. The creaking, cumbrous but fundamentally democratic nature of royal forests smacks of slow Anglo-Saxon evolution rather than the imposition

7 of Norman hegemony. No dastardly baron could have devised a three-tier system that featured elected magistrates in the verderer’s court, then a jury followed at ridiculously long intervals by a pompous assembly in Chelmsford or Stratford that frequently dismissed supposed offenders because they were too poor. Or had died of old age.

Above: A standard issue, Epping Forest coppard! A product of an ancient coppice stool being subsequently both coppiced and pollarded! The dog’s name is Taz

The Pond

Lodge Pond is in the north-east quadrant of Epping Forest’s St Thomas Quarters. In 1978 researchers from the Field Study Centre at High Beech and King’s College, London, published a joint paper discussing pollen from core samples taken here. This was a first for any ancient English woodland. They found almost complete lime dominance until early Anglo-Saxon times – followed by a two- stage collapse of Tilia cordata and replacement first by birch and then hornbeam and beech. This contrasted with pollen counts from Hampstead Heath, on the opposite side of the Lea Valley, where a much earlier ‘lime decline’ was indicated. This was typical of most other European sites. Epping Forest was exceptional, but seemed to confirm Tilia cordata as the prime component of ancient ‘wildwood’.

The Lodge Pond team’s publication, ‘Woodland Continuity and Change’ is a delight to read. In the best scientific tradition, they make every effort to falsify their results, and with an extensive review of local topography and pre-history, it’s eminently accessible to the non-specialist. But as results from other sites proliferated, Anglo-Saxon lime decline became anomalous. A new generation of researchers began to hint at some methodological error. Eventually, the Conservators commissioned a re-assessment. According to this, the Lodge Pond result is still unusual, but lime decline was wound back to the first century AD. Coincidentally, this is the same time that Londinium was being built not so very far away.

For all its’ excellence, hind sight suggests three flaws in Woodland Continuity and Change. First. Lodge Pond is obviously artificial and originates from the damming of a spring lying in a slight hollow. Acknowledging this, the authors conclude the pond was an incidental feature of carrying an ancient trackway over boggy ground on an embankment. They omit the alternative – the raised bank was made to create a pond and the trackway subsequently took advantage of this. An artificial pond in a limewood mitigates against the whole notion of wildwood; it’s likely to have been intended for watering cattle or retting bast fibres. Or both.

Second, they didn’t notice a small detail mentioned in an early journal of the Essex Field Club; it has the power to transform Epping Forest pre-history. In the early 1880’s, club members dug (or, rather, supervised the digging of others; this was a gentleman’s club) trial trenches at Amesbury Banks, an early British earthwork standing in beech woodland just a few hundred yards away. They found that the earthworks sealed a clearly defined heathland that had lain dormant since around 400 BC. In Victorian time, and for a long time after, lowland heath was considered to be a perfectly natural habitat; modern interpretation is very different. Heathland in southern England derives from human- enhanced grazing, fire and endless exploitation.

Third. Like their successors, they hadn’t noticed that Lodge Pond is surrounded by multi-stemmed beech clusters. A walk around St Thomas Quarters would have revealed hundreds more. And that’s without the numerous examples of scarred root plates that still have vestiges of stems that didn’t escape late Victorian thinning. The name itself hints at former coppice and buried in obscurity is the information that part of St Thomas Quarters, at the least, was last coppiced in the 1820’s. They might have pondered on the antiquity of these trees, whether they reached back towards lime decline. And how beech and hornbeam might have moved in with such alacrity without help!

Documents Demonstrating Coppicing

In recent time, people who know the Forest well have paid more attention to multi-stemmed trees. The late Ken Hoy, for example, in his ‘Getting to Know Epping Forest‘ (2002) gives an excellent summary and a later edition ponders at some length on their significance. MW Hanson, who edited ‘EF Through the Eye of a Naturalist’ (1992) talks of former coppicing, though he falls short of claiming it went on everywhere. Forest Superintendent Quist, in his ‘Epping Forest’ published by the Corporation of London (1971) also acknowledges former coppice stools.

The most significant secondary source is Thomas Fowell Buxton, one of the principal architects of the Corporations early thinning policy and a man with a previous history of managing parts of Epping Forest. He was unequivocal: Epping Forest pollards were derived from coppices.

Our favourite source is the Minutes of the Epping Forest Arbitration Court. This settled disputes and grievances in the wake of the Epping Forest Act. The ‘loppers of Loughton’, the commoners who had been instrumental in leading the fight to save Epping Forest from destruction, were claiming compensation for the loss of their firewood. The Corporation didn’t want to pay them a penny and both sides were represented in court by senior Council. Learned discussion ensued which hinged on the number of trees within the manor of Loughton that could be lopped and there was much debate as to the status of many hornbeam pollards that appeared to share the same root plate. Without mentioning the word ‘coppice’ they’re providing a window on the Forest as it was before the Corporation’s thinning programme began.

Another window courtesy of Victorian litigation is a test case bought by a Loughton freeholder, Frederick Castell, against the lord of the manor in respect of lopping rights. Among much else he complains that the Rev Maitland has cut down more than 50,000 pollards that the complainant had

9 the right to lop. He would have been a busy man! The response by Maitland’s lawyer was never contradicted – while the commoners had rights to lop existing pollards, the trees cut were maiden stems from coppice stools. This accounts for the curious coppards found around the northern Forest. This last major incidence of coppicing in the heart of Epping Forest was in 1862.

The best bonanza of all comes from the Chancery case ‘Commissioner of Sewers v Glasse’, when the Corporation of London challenged Forest enclosures. The Corporation were funded by a special tax on grain imports into the port of London; expense was no object and they funded the transcription of every known document related to the Forest, going back to 1064. Among these, the Court of Attachment Rolls were printed in a short run and they provide a wonderful record of almost a hundred applications to the Verderers Court and the Lord Chief Justice in Eyre for license to enclose coppices. A much larger quantity of manuscript transcriptions were bound for convenience into large volumes and they can be studied at The National Archives, without the trouble of a Latin phrase book. They can be found at TNA WORK 9. Strange to tell, since Fishers ‘Forest of Essex’, only two short pieces of published work appear to have made use of them.

These transcripts demonstrate that Waltham Abbey routinely coppiced their woods such as St Thomas Quarters and others in Sewardstone, Waltham Holy Cross, Epping, Loughton and Woodford and sent wood to London by water transport. They provide evidence of sustained coppicing in every Forest manor, including woods that no longer exist. And they record every numbing detail of such forest court records as survive from medieval times. All with the authority of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Record Office, who gave his formal seal of approval that these were authentic copies of the original.

In Praise of Epping Butter.

Back in the early 1800’s, Epping was noted for the excellence of its butter and this was attributed to the eclectic diet of the Epping cow. Not just grass, but tasty leaves and succulent buds in season. They didn’t just lurk under pollards, gazing enviously at all that fodder – there were still some coppices to feast in. Sustainable feasting for cows was an important part of Epping Forest’s evolution and this paper hopes to put well-fed bovines back on the agenda. Not only in Epping Forest but other royal forests and ‘wood pastures’ throughout the land.

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Thankyou Dr Rackham! This paper tries to argue against some of the ideas about Epping Forest put forward by Dr Oliver Rackham. Contradiction, right or wrong, it would not have been possible without his unfailing courtesy, willingness to engage in correspondence with two brazen heretics, and curiosity in coming down from Cambridge to look for himself.

Anybody who would like a referenced version of this paper, or would like to correspond more generally, should email Pete Byfield: [email protected]

Tim and Pete will be looking at Leaf Break in Epping Forest on Sunday 22 April, starting from the small High Beech tea hut at 11am; we’ll be walking 5-6 miles very slowly. You’re very welcome to join us – just let Pete know in advance. We can arrange transport from Chingford Station if needed.

This paper was prepared for the Forests of Essex Conference held by Place Services, Essex County Council in February 2018. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of Place Services or Essex County Council.