Not only did William the Conqueror have the nerve to, well, conquer, he also nicked our woods. England had always been a paradise for trees, covered from the end of the last ice age in increasingly dense forests of oak, hazel and birch, with some pine. When early islanders began farming, the tree cover slowly began to give way to pasture and cultivated land, but under Anglo-Saxon kings, the forests still belonged to the landowners and their subjects.
William, however, introduced "Forest Law", which claimed the woodlands as the hunting grounds of kings. Anyone stealing or killing a deer or boar would be in a whole heap of trouble: by the end of Richard the Lionheart's reign in 1198, that punishment was mutilation, including the removal of your eyes and other unmentionable parts.
Soon afterwards, Forest Law was modified under the Magna Carta, but the scrabble for forests – and the money that could be made from them – continued until well into the 17th century. Hunting, though, remained the preserve of kings; they had monopolies on the forests and many of the animals, too. Famously, Henry VIII could wear out eight horses in one day, while the insecure Charles I found relief and confidence in his unquestioned abilities as a hunter (Van Dyck's portrait of Charles I at the Hunt hangs in the Louvre in Paris).
Forest Law finally sputtered to a halt during the second half of the 17th century – but by then, newly secured enclosures had taken a large bite out of the forests, which were also sources of fuel for a rapidly growing population.
The navy had, for many years, depended on English forests for their ships. According to legend, the Spanish asked one of their ambassadors, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, to sneak up and set fire to the Forest of Dean, hoping it would give their Armada an advantage. As England's navy grew, the need for timber began to seriously pick away at the woodland: from an estimated land coverage of 15% in 1086, England's forests and woods had dwindled to just 5.2% by 1905.
The first world war was the low point, and in 1916 Herbert Asquith's government established the Acland committee to study the problem. They said England desperately needed to replenish and maintain "strategic reserves of timber", and within a few years the Forestry Act would lead to the establishment of the Forestry Commission to carry this out.
In the years since, a steady programme of afforestation has increased England's forest cover back to 13% – not far off the levels of 1,000 years ago. To put that in context, many other European countries average about 37% coverage, so England still has one of the continent's lowest levels. But the commitment to afforestation is clear, with modern English foresters using a wide variety of native broadleaf, conifers and species that could thrive in our changing climate.
Great English Trees
The 2000-year-old-old lime
Standing humbly amid all the wonderful specimens of the National Arboretum at Westonbirt is one of England's oldest trees: a small-leaved lime that may be up to 2,000 years old. The tree was coppiced down to its stumps last November; then artist Richard Harris was commissioned to create a sculpture in its honour, using hundreds of its cut stems.
England's oldest oak is not in a forest but on a grassy meadow, near the town of Bourne in southern Lincolnshire. Thought to be more than 1,000 years old, it has a hollow trunk of about 12 metres, the inside of which was once used as a tearoom with door and roof built in. It is listed by Guinness World Records, and can be visited at Bowthorpe Park Farm.
Savernake Forest in Wiltshire is a small and precious souvenir of the wild woodland that once covered much of southern England. At the heart of Savernake stands the Big Belly Oak, a giant of the sessile oak variety, with a girth of more than 11 metres. The tree is believed to have taken root in the days of William the Conqueror, around 1,000 years ago. You can spot it by the side of the A346, south of the hamlet of Cadley.
In the middle of the New Forest, at the start of Bolderwood Ornamental Drive, is Knightwood Oak, the forest's largest and one of its oldest, too. In the 1990s, its girth was recorded at 7.4 metres and growing – despite its wood having been harvested over hundreds of years using the ancient system of pollarding. Learn more about the tree from this podcast.
The 80-hectare Shining Cliff ancient woodland, on the west bank of the river Derwent in Derbyshire, was once part of the royal hunting forest of Duffield Frith. It contains the remains of Betty Kenny, a bruised and battered yew said to have inspired the nursery rhyme "Rock a Bye Baby". A circular waymarked trail passes the tree and a rich variety of other plantlife, fed by springs that seep up through the ground.
An ancient giant of Wiltshire's Savernake Forest, the King of Limbs is a pollarded oak – a traditional technique for harvesting timber while encouraging new growth. Thought to be about 1,000 years old and once described as "a giant octopus erupted from the deep", this oak gained a legion of new fans when the band Radiohead named an album after it.
Salcey Forest,only seven miles from Northampton, is the remains of a medieval royal hunting wood. As well as the ruins of iron age buildings, this precious 500-hectare forest is home to the "druids" – a series of oaks up to 600 years old. One of the most famous is the Milking Oak, under whose cooling shade Salcey's cattle were once milked.
The 120-hectare Bedgebury National Pinetum, a world famous collection of conifers near Tunbridge Wells, boasts the tallest tree in Kent among its 12,000 trees and shrubs. This grand fir, known as "the Old Man of Kent", was planted in 1840 by Viscount Beresford, who owned the Bedgebury estate and was a field marshal in Wellington's army. The tree stands a mighty 51 metres tall.
