Accounts of court actions present an unfavourable perspective on lawlessness in the Forest. Records of good citizenship do not balance these accounts! However, the actions do provide testament to the application of justice, which is often thorough and considered.
William I introduced the Law of the Forest. Harsh penalties, such as blinding and dismemberment, were the stated punishment for failure to respect the King’s venison, deer and wild boar, within the Royal Forest. However, evidence of these punishments being exacted is hard to find and a fine or amercement became the accepted penalty for transgression. The income from fines was more acceptable than mutilation to a King, burdened with Exchequer pressures under a regimen of building castles and conducting expensive military campaigns.
Court actions within the Law of the Forest are well recorded. The following is an example from Inquisitions concerning the Venison in the Forest of Essex¹
“On the day of St Thomas the Martyr in the twenty-fourth of the reign of king Henry (29 December 1239) ‘Gilbert Dun the forester and Robert his servant were riding through the Forest of Hainault; and they saw eight men with bows and arrows and greyhounds in the same forest.’
Wisely, Gilbert sent for help. The men could reasonably be presumed to be poaching deer, since dogs, whose very presence within the forest was illegal, were on hand. The dogs were greyhounds, and would not have been lawed². Finding eight, armed men in that situation placed the forester and his servant in a threatening situation, which occasionally foresters did not survive! The next day Gilbert returned to the forest with others and on seeing the men again, “. . . they raised the cry upon them, and followed them and put them to flight, but they did not know what became of them; but the men were harboured at the house of Richard, the son of Peter of London and Woodford”.
It was then customary for the foresters and verderers to set up an inquisition into the incident to which representatives of a number, and usually four, neighbouring townships were called to give their version of events, if they had one. In this case the townships were Barking, Stapleford Abbots, Lambourne and Wanstead. In turn, each said that they knew nothing. Other witnesses testified:
“John the son of Roger, the woodward of Chigwell, says that when he was on his way to the wood in Hainault . . . he saw seven men, five with bows and two with four greyhounds, of whom three had masks, and he showed this to Roger his father; and the same Roger asked him if he recognised the men. He replied that John le Blund of Edmonton was one of them.” John le Blund had kept his pigs in the wood under pannage³.
Accusations were sometimes based entirely on circumstantial evidence. “John the woodward of Lambourne, says that he suspects the parson of Stapleford because he often saw him going with greyhounds in the forest of the lord King”. The woodward was an officer of a wood in charge of the growing timber. It was not unusual for the finger of suspicion to be pointed towards the local vicar, or indeed to a forest official.
Simon the son of Conis of Chigwell, who had already testified against Nicholas the son of Osbert and Eudes the fisher, both from Chigwell, then added that when he came “to the house of his lord Richard the son of Peter in Woodford for a quarter of oats and three sheepskins to take away to London, and had reached the door of the aforesaid house, two men came out with bows and arrows and seized him and made him pledge faith that he would show nothing of them to anybody, and that he would forthwith go the way that he first proposed to go; and they followed him a full furlong saying to him that if he returned they would punish him severely”.
The inquisition was a preliminary to a hearing of the case at a Forest Eyre, a circuit court of the Forest, before the Chief Justice of the Forests. The evidence against the suspects compelled them to attend. It was usual to confiscate chattels from those bound to appear. The chattels found at the house of Richard were 40 sheep and eight quarters of oats. The chattels were entrusted to named individuals for safekeeping.
For the time being, Justice was seen to be done.
1 Turner, G. J. (ed. for The Selden Society), Select Pleas of the Forest, (London, 1901) 2. Under the Law of the Forest, dogs had to be ‘lawed’: that is, they were required to have three nails cut from a fore paw to prevent them from chasing deer. 3. Pannage is the feeding, or the right to feed, pigs within a wood on acorns or beech-mast.