- Coldharbour and the Hanger Country
- The Woodmote
- Timber, Coppice, and the Charcoal Families
- Pannage, Assart, and the Litigated Wood
- Why the Wood Is Safe
- The Combes, and What They Hold
- The Other Answer to Why the Wood Is Safe
- The Waste Between the Hangers
“Every hanger hath a name and every name hath an owner, and if you cannot say both you are trespassing whatever you thought you were doing.”
Coldharbour and the Hanger Country
The word names a position and not a wood. A hanger is beech hanging upon a scarp too steep to put a plough to; and because no plough could come at it, the hanging ground stands yet where the flat was cleared. Hence their shape, which is not chance but consequence: long, narrow, following the contour, a mile in length and two hundred yards across.
Against that pattern stands Coldharbour, the seat of the Woodmote: some four thousand acres in the folds of the northern Wold, the largest continuous woodland in the High South, and the only one with a settlement inside it. No other hanger is lived in. The village holds perhaps three hundred souls: woodwards, sawyers, hurdlemakers, a smith, an inn, and the moot hall where the court sits.
Strangest of them is Ladywood, which everybody handles carefully. Its name is older than any record of the reason for it, so that the reason is lost, and the country will not speculate upon it before outsiders. For as long as the rolls run the Woodmote has kept a lighter hand there: less cutting, no assart ever granted, and a standing instruction that the rides be walked in pairs. No verderer has ever put a reason on the roll.
Grimsdell is steep and dark. What comes off it comes off burnt, for the hanger is worked for charcoal and not timber; and there the burning families keep their principal hearths. Best of the timber, and most closely managed, are the King’s Copses upon the northern Downs. Beyond these lie the small hangers, Combe and Netherwood and Ashen Hanger and a dozen more, each kept by a single holding under the Woodmote’s general jurisdiction.
The whole belt is bounded, and the bounds are ridden. Every third year the regarders walk the perimeter of every licensed hanger, note what encroachment, assart and waste they find, and present it at the next sitting. In Coldharbour the riding is a public occasion. It takes eleven days, and draws anyone with an interest, which is most of the wood villages and a good many from the Wold.
The Woodmote
“Wee are foure, wee are chosen for life, wee are paid nothing, and wee cannot be put out. That is not a privilege. That is the onely arrangement under which a man will tell a duke that hee may not have his timber.”
Older than any court still sitting in the belt, the Woodmote of Coldharbour has twice been asked to give way and twice declined: the archbishopric within living memory, the Collegium after, and upheld in both. No other body in the belt has done as much and stood. It sits three times a year in the moot hall, and its jurisdiction is not the county but the hangers and everything in them.
Four verderers hold it, elected by the freeholders of the hanger country, serving for life, unpaid and unremovable. The unremovability is the whole design. A verderer who cannot be dismissed can refuse a Great House, and a removable one, it was found before the Conformities, could not; hence the office has stood so ever since, for that reason and no other.
Below them the woodwards, the enforcement in the wood, each holding his assigned rides, walking them daily; and beside them the regarders, who are not officers of the wood but freeholders appointed for the triennial riding, to inspect the woodwards as much as the wood. The wood is watched, and so are the watchers.
Its business is the wood’s own: waste, assart, trespass, pannage, charcoal licence, of which the theft of standing timber is the head that reaches a company. Its penalties are fines, forfeiture of timber, and the severe one, the withdrawal of a holding’s wood rights; and in a country where fuel and building material alike come out of the hanger, a holding so stripped goes cold, and is close to ruined. Appeal lies nowhere. The Woodmote is a court of first and last instance, and has twice defended that position in the assize, successfully both times.
Its refusal of the chapter every lawyer in the belt knows by heart. Oxford asserted a claim over timber out of a hanger in which it held the advowson; the verderers refused; the refusal was upheld. Oxford has never tried again. It stands as the case for the proposition that the chapter’s authority is not general but jurisdictional; and alone in this, that the body which refused was four unpaid men in a moot hall.
Timber, Coppice, and the Charcoal Families
“We move the hearth every three weeks, and no daughter of mine has ever married out of the burning. It is not that they will not have us. It is that we have not the leisure to be courted.”
Timber is sold standing and felled to order, which is what makes the inventory mean anything. A buyer purchases named trees, marked by the woodward, at a price set upon the verderers’ scale, the felling is done under supervision, and the extraction is by such routes and in such seasons as the Woodmote allows. Beech and ash go mostly eastward to Cambridge, and become there scaffolding, patterns, cart work, and the enormous consumption of the yards.
The other half is the coppice, and it employs more people than the timber. Hazel and hornbeam, cut upon a seven-year rotation, yield hurdles, hoops, handles, thatching spars, bean rods, and the whole small trade that keeps a wood village in cash between harvests. The work is skilled, badly paid and entirely reliable. Yet it is the coppice cycle, and not the timber, that puts men into the hangers every week of the year.
Distinct among the hanger people are the charcoal burners, whom the belt regards as a sort apart. They live in the wood from spring to autumn, move their hearths every few weeks, and work in families, and they are respected for a difficult and dangerous skill. They are not married into. Their standing is precisely that of the Row grinders at Cambridge: indispensable, well paid by the measure of their neighbours, and socially separate for reasons nobody quite articulates.
Their burnt wood goes to the pits, the furnaces, the fulling coppers and the small trades, and the charcoal licence is therefore the Woodmote’s most contested grant. Burning eats coppice at a rate that competes with the hurdle trade; a hanger licensed to be heavily burnt is a hanger that will not supply spars for a decade; and the yearly allocation is fought over at every spring sitting by parties fighting over it since their grandfathers.
Bark for the tanners, mast for the pigs, brushwood, the leaf-mould that is the wood’s own rot, and the standing right of the villages to take dead and fallen wood for their hearths make up the remainder. That last right is estovers. It is small and ancient, and it is the one the Woodmote guards most jealously against erosion, upon the plain ground that a wood village which goes cold will take living timber, and that there will then be a real problem.
Pannage, Assart, and the Litigated Wood
“I have satte on this courte nine yeares and I have heard the same pannage matter foure tymes, betwixt the same two houses, upon the same fourty acres. Wee decide it the same way every tyme and they come agayne.”
Among the most litigated rights in Britannia is pannage, the right to turn pigs into the autumn mast for some six weeks from late September. The Woodmote fixes yearly the number of beasts, the holdings entitled, the compartments opened and the days allowed. Every one of the four has been disputed in every generation for four hundred years.
It matters so much because the mast is free feed at exactly the season when winter feed is reckoned. A holding with pannage for forty pigs has six weeks of fattening it need not buy, which in a short hay year is the difference between selling stock and keeping it. The right is therefore worth real money. It attaches to the land, and it is the commonest subject of boundary and tenure dispute in the hanger country.
Assart, the clearing of woodland for cultivation, is the offence the Woodmote treats most seriously after the theft of timber, and it is so treated because it is permanent. An acre once lost to the plough does not come back. It is licensed rarely, refused usually, prosecuted with vigour where it is done without leave, nor does the regarders’ triennial riding exist for any other principal purpose. The court has ordered the replanting of assarts thirty years old.
The litigation is out of all proportion to the money, and in that lies the character of the place. Wood rights are ancient, they attach to holdings and not to men, and they are recorded in rolls that run further back than any other muniment in the county. A pannage dispute is therefore never only about pigs. It is about whose grandfather held what, and the parties will spend more upon the case than the right is worth, because what is lost with it is something larger.
Why the Wood Is Safe
“Ther is no thing in Coldharbour that we knowe nat of. That is nat to seye ther is no thing. It is to seye that we knowe, and that knowynge is the hool of the kepynge.”
Least feared of all the wild ground in Britannia are the hangers, and the reason is administrative entire. They are walked daily, every tree of any value is numbered, the bounds are ridden every third year, and the wood villages live inside them. Nothing accumulates in a wood that a hundred people work. The belt holds this not for a happy accident but for a settled principle.
Alys Coldharbour’s presentment of 4508 is the classic statement of it, and deserves taking seriously as an argument. The wood is safe because it is walked; remove the woodward, give the hanger seven years, and it will be as fearful as any northern forest, not because anything has come into it but because the country will have forgotten what is in it. The argument is the Wardens of the Quiet Ground’s own doctrine, applied to woodland. The two bodies are on good terms.
What is in the hangers is accordingly known, small, and for the most part managed. Ladywood’s lighter regime and its paired rides are the clearest exception, and are not explained. Two named places in Grimsdell the woodwards route around. And at Coldharbour a standing arrangement, entered in no roll, which the Concord of Saint Winnow endorsed in 4501 and which the verderers call, when they must call it anything, the understanding.
The Woodmote’s formal position is that it administers timber and has cognisance of nothing else. Its practical position is that it employs sixty men who walk the same ground every day, knows the hangers better than any body in the belt, and reports what it sees to the wardens of the Quiet Ground and not to the chapter. The arrangement is a century old. It has never been written down, and thence comes the poverty of the chapter’s information about the hanger country.
For a company the hangers are steady employment of an unglamorous kind: timber theft, organised and profitable, illegal assart, which wants somebody to go and look, wood burnt without licence, and the pursuit of anything or anyone that has taken to the wood, which is the Woodmote’s own bounty and is posted upon the Clearance Roll. The Coldharbour Men have most of this work and are jealous of it. A newcomer will be told so within a day.
The Combes, and What They Hold
“There are eleven combes and the ridings go into nine. I could tell you which two and I could not tell you why, because they were not in the ridings when I came and I did not put them in.”
The hanger country is timber ground before it is anything else, and its shape governs a great deal that the Woodmote explains institutionally. The slope is cut by combes, which are dry valleys, steep-sided, wooded to the lip, and running down from the ridge to the vale. Each of them is a hollow, and what the hollow does is the whole of the matter.
A combe holds things, and everything else about it follows from that. It holds weather, so that a combe floor may be still upon a day the ridge cannot be stood on, warm in a frost, and fogged when nothing else is. It holds sound, so that a voice at the head carries to the foot, and a voice fifty yards up the side is lost in silence. And it holds cold air at night, whence the frost pockets lie upon the floors and not the tops, and whence nothing is planted there.
The ridings go into nine of the eleven, and this is the fact the Woodmote does not explain. A riding is a cut way through the hanger for the woodwards to walk, ancient, maintained, its pattern standing in the riding book four hundred years back. Two combes have never had one. Cecily Gerrard’s answer to why is the honest one: that they were not in the ridings when she came, that she has not added them, nor has any woodward in the book’s four centuries added them either.
What the shepherds do with the combes is the other half of the country’s use, and is entirely practical. Sheep are brought into a combe in bad weather, because the combe is the shelter; and Wilfrid Ashe’s walking book gives which combe for which wind. Nine are used. The same two are not; and Ashe’s account of why differs from Gerrard’s in every particular except the two combes, which are the same two.
Nobody in the hanger country will discuss the two directly and everybody will discuss them obliquely, which is the belt’s ordinary treatment of a thing that has no evidence behind it and has been observed for four hundred years. No story attaches to them. No name. No incident that anybody can date. Nothing but the silence, and two hollows out of eleven that the woodwards do not ride and the shepherds do not use, and two records establishing as much, kept independently by people who do not work together.
For a company the hanger country is the belt’s best-administered wild ground, and the administration is not a thing to work around but to work with. The Woodmote’s writ in the wood is absolute, and its officers’ word upon what happened in a wood is conclusive. A company that goes through a woodward is believed afterwards. A company that does not will find that the only account of its conduct is the woodward’s.
The Other Answer to Why the Wood Is Safe
“We have never once cut early and we have twice been offered a great deal of money to. My grandfather refused the second offer in a bad year with nothing in the house.”
Why the wood is safe has been answered institutionally, and every word of that answer is true. It is nevertheless an account not of safety but of enforcement. The hanger country keeps another answer, which it gives among itself.
The other answer is the rotation. The hangers are coppiced upon turns of between twelve and eighteen years, family by family, upon ground each family has held longer than the Woodmote has existed. The turn is not a silvicultural optimum, nor do the families defend it as one. That turn has always been used upon that ground, it is never broken, and the consistency with which it is not broken is the thing an outsider finds hardest to credit.
Alys Tredgold’s testimony at the Woodmote of 4614 is the fullest statement anybody has made of it. She was asked, in a dispute about an assart, why her family had refused an offer to cut early in a year when they had nothing. Her answer, minuted, was that the turn is fifteen years, and that a family which cuts at fourteen has not gained a year but ended something. She was not asked what. The Woodmote found for her upon other grounds, and the silence stands in the roll where the question should be.
What the two answers have to do with one another is the interesting part, and the Woodmote has never had to decide it. Enforcement and rotation point the same way in almost every case, for a wood that is walked is also a wood that is worked regularly by the same families, and neither the Woodmote nor the families have reason to distinguish their contributions. The two occasions in four centuries upon which a rotation was broken by order of the Woodmote are the only test. The record gives the litigation and not the outcome.
The charcoal families hold the same view in another form and are readier to say it, theirs being the lower trade and its people less careful of the Woodmote’s good opinion. Their formulation is that a wood which is used is a wood which is answered for, that an empty hanger is not safe merely because nobody is cutting it, and that the ground least to be feared in the belt is the ground with the most people upon it. This runs exactly counter to what Oxford expects; yet it is consistent with everything the Concord has found.
A company should therefore be careful of a piece of hanger that is upon nobody’s rotation, and there are perhaps six such pieces in the Coldharbour country. They are not forbidden, not fenced, not remarkable to look at, and simply not in any family’s turn. Gerrard can name all six. Tredgold can name the same six. Neither has ever been asked for the list by anybody, and both gave it without hesitation when asked.
The Waste Between the Hangers
“Between the wood and the ploughed ground there is a mile of nothing that belongs to nobody, and there are perhaps two hundred people on it in this county. They are not vagrants. Most of them were born there.”
Between the hangers and the cultivated vale lies a belt of ground that is neither: gorse, scrub, old assart gone back, poor grazing, and the broken country the Woodmote does not claim and the estates have not troubled to enclose. It runs to some thousands of acres across the Coldharbour country, and it holds people.
Who they are is the first thing to establish, because the county describes them badly. They are not the hidden refuges of the Oxford ring, nor anything like them: that is another arrangement and to another purpose. They are households that have been upon the waste for generations, keeping a few beasts, cutting gorse and turf, taking casual work at the harvest and in the woods, and paying nothing to anybody. Nobody has a claim to be paid.
They have, instead of tenure, the fact of being there, and it has held for a century because it has never been worth anybody’s while to test it. An estate that enclosed the waste would gain poor ground and a quarrel. The Woodmote’s writ stops at the wood’s edge. The parish takes no rate from them and gives them no relief. Roger Malle’s deposition of 4609 is the only muniment in the belt that describes the arrangement, and he made it in the course of saying that it was not his business.
The assarts are what is changing it. The litigation is four centuries deep. Ground taken in from the waste is ground somebody has a title to, and every assart of the last thirty years has moved the line outward and moved somebody off. The Concord has taken depositions from four waste households, because the Concord is the only body any of them will speak to; which is an odd office for a body that treats with land-powers, yet one the Concord has accepted without comment.
The waste keeps what it keeps as a matter not of poverty but of obligation. These are households four generations upon the same unowned ground, with no incumbent, no vestry, no landlord and no woodward; whereby whatever is kept upon that ground is kept by them alone, and has been so kept for as long as the belt has any record of them. Joanna Skeat has told the Concord what her household keeps. The Concord has entered it in the roll and has not summarised it. The roll does that only where a term is still live.