- Wychwood
- The Woodmote
- The Regard
- Who Is in the Wood
- What the Wood Says Is in the North
- Going Into the Wood
“The wood is not the priory’s, not the Crown’s, not the parish’s. Every one of the three will tell you otherwise with a document in its hand. What the wood actually belongs to is the court that meets in it, and the court has no document at all.”
Wychwood
“Eleven thousand acres by the last survey and the survey was optimistic. The northern quarter has not been walked in my lifetime, is on the map as wood, and is on the map because it was wood when somebody drew it.”
Wychwood covers the western third of the march and is the largest continuous woodland in the north of the realm. It is oak over most of its extent, with ash and thorn on the margins, hazel coppice worked on a cycle in the south-east quarter, alder where it comes down to the water. The last survey put it at eleven thousand acres, which is generous, since the survey walked seven thousand and took the rest from an earlier map.
It is worked hard where it is worked. The southern half carries coppice on a seven-year rotation, charcoal hearths that move with the cutting, pannage for the parishes on its edge, and a timber trade that supplies Harrowgate and sends good oak as far as the coast. The wood pays for itself several times over and is the single largest source of the priory’s cash income, which is the reason the priory cares about it a great deal more than it cares about the wold.
The northern quarter is a different matter and the difference is the subject of the chapter following. It is not coppiced, not cut, not walked, and not surveyed within living memory. It appears on every map as wood because it was wood when the map was made, and no map has been made since. What is in it is a question the wood answers with a good deal less confidence than the fen answers the same question about the carrs.
The distinction the wood draws is not between wooded and open but between worked ground and unworked. A traveller should adopt it at once. A worked wood is full of people: cutters, charcoal burners, swineherds in the pannage season, carters, the verderers who move through all of it. An unworked wood has nobody in it at all. The transition between the two is abrupt enough to be seen from a track.
The rides are the wood’s roads and they are entirely artificial. A ride is a cut line kept open for hauling timber, twenty feet wide, straight where the ground allows, and maintained by the same obligation that maintains anything else in the march. There are nine principal rides in Wychwood. Seven are kept. Two are on the rolls, have not been cut in three generations, and are now indistinguishable from the wood on either side of them.
What a company should understand before going in is that a wood is not open country with trees on it. Distance is unreadable, direction is unreadable without sun, sound carries strangely and unevenly. A party that leaves a ride will be lost within a quarter mile and will not believe it for another half. The verderers lose visitors most years. They find nearly all of them, and the finding is done by knowing where people go wrong rather than by tracking.
The Woodmote
“We sit under the Lord Oak at the Michaelmas quarter and we have sat there as long as there has been anybody to sit. The assize sits in a hall at Harrowgate and can be moved by anybody with a reason. This court cannot be moved, because if it sat anywhere else it would not be this court.”
The woodmote is the court of Wychwood, meets four times a year, and sits in the open air under a particular tree at a particular crossing of rides. It hears everything that arises in the wood: cutting disputes, pannage rights, charcoal hearths, timber theft, and the annual presentments of the regarders. It has jurisdiction nobody has ever defined and is obeyed without much question by everybody who works the wood.
Its officers are four in kind and they are worth distinguishing because a company will meet all of them. The verderers, of whom there are four, are the judges and hold for life. The regarders walk the wood and present what they find, and are appointed annually from the parishes. The woodwards are the working officers of particular walks. The agisters take the pannage money and count the swine, and are the only officers anybody is pleased to see.
The Lord Oak is not remarkable and the wood is quite clear that it is not. It is a large oak at a crossing, perhaps three hundred years old, in fair condition, with nothing about it that would draw a second glance anywhere else in the wood. What it has is the court, and the wood holds that the relation runs in that direction rather than the other. The tree matters because the court sits there and not the reverse.
The court is nevertheless very particular about the tree. When the previous Lord Oak came down in a gale within the record, the woodmote met beside the fallen trunk for eleven years while an argument went on about the successor, and the argument was settled by the verderers walking the wood together and agreeing. The fallen trunk has not been cut up, lies where it fell, and is the one piece of timber in Wychwood that nobody will take firewood from. The wood is quite clear that this is not reverence and that the tree was never blessed by anybody, and it is equally clear that a man who burned a piece of it would not be welcome at the hearths that season.
Procedure is oral throughout and this is the part that most surprises a visitor from a county with a proper court. Nothing is pleaded in writing. The regarders present by speaking. The parties speak. The verderers confer aloud, in front of everybody, and announce. A clerk writes the result into the rolls afterward and the rolls are a record of decisions rather than of proceedings, which is why they are so short and so useless to anybody trying to reconstruct a case.
The sanction is the wood itself. A man against whom the woodmote finds may lose his right to cut, to burn, to pannage, or to take timber, for a term or for good, and there is no appeal to Harrowgate because the assize has never accepted that it has jurisdiction. The Crown has twice been asked to take the wood into its own forest law and has twice declined, on the ground that it would then have to pay for the walking.
The Regard
“Three weeks, four men, and every acre of the seven thousand that can be walked. We look at the bounds, the rides, the hearths, the coppice, the standings, the water, and what the beasts are doing. Then we say it out loud in front of the court. It is the only part of my office that anybody remembers I hold.”
The regard is the annual walking of the wood and is the exact counterpart of the upland bounding and the fen’s island walk. Four regarders, appointed from the edge parishes, walk the whole of the worked wood over three weeks before Michaelmas, inspect a fixed list of things, and present what they find to the woodmote aloud. It is the wood’s entire mechanism for knowing its own condition.
The list is fixed and has not changed in the rolls. The bounds and their marks. The rides, and whether they are open. The coppice, and whether each fall is being taken at its year. The charcoal hearths, and whether any is burning where it should not. The standings and lodges. The streams and whether anything has been thrown into them. And the last item, which is the one that matters here.
The last item is what the beasts are doing, and the regarders take it as seriously as the bounds. Deer are counted roughly and their distribution is noted. The swine are asked after. Where the crows are settling is recorded, in the same terms the upland uses on the barrows. And any ground where the ordinary animals of the wood are not is presented by name, without comment attached, and entered in the rolls as ground the regarders could not account for. Three such entries in the present century carry a second line in the clerk’s hand noting that the parish was advised to keep its bells, which is as near as the rolls of a timber court ever come to naming a haunt.
That entry is the wood’s equivalent of the fen’s standing item and the upland’s called mark, and counting them across the rolls gives the same measurement. There are eleven such entries in the present century. Seven of the eleven concern ground in the northern half. Three concern the same walk in three different decades. One concerns a coppice fall in the south that was presented once, worked normally the following year, and has never been presented again.
The regard has been failing at its edges for two generations and the rolls show it plainly to anybody who reads them in order. The walking now covers seven thousand acres, was ten thousand four decades ago, and the boundary of what is walked has moved inward in the north on eleven separate occasions, each time by a small amount, each time for a stated and adequate reason. Nobody has ever decided to walk less of the wood.
The verderers are aware of this. One of the four keeps a private note of where the regard has stopped each year, has kept it for nineteen years, and showed it to the priory once without result. His argument is the argument of chapter nine and he did not need to read it anywhere: that ground stops being the wood’s at the moment the regarders stop walking it, and that everything afterward is a matter of finding out how long it takes to notice.
Who Is in the Wood
“Cutters, burners, swineherds, carters, the four of us, the regarders in September, and the people the court does not ask about. I have held this walk for twenty-two years. I could take you to three families in it that are in nobody’s book at all and have been there longer than my office has existed.”
The worked wood carries a working population that comes and goes with the season. Coppice cutters work from autumn to spring and live at the falls in huts they build and abandon. Charcoal burners live at their hearths for the whole of the burning season and are a settled people in a way the cutters are not. Swineherds come in for the pannage in October and go out in December. Carters come and go daily.
The charcoal burners are the wood’s permanent inhabitants in everything but law and are worth a company’s attention before any other group in the district. They are few, perhaps nine families in the whole of Wychwood, intermarried, and they hold their hearth sites by a custom the woodmote recognises and cannot explain. They know the wood better than the verderers, are consulted by them privately and not publicly, and are regarded with a wariness that nobody in the wood is able to justify when asked.
There are also people in the wood who are in nobody’s book. This is stated plainly by the woodwards and evasively by everybody else. Families live in the wood, chiefly in the middle ground between the worked and unworked halves, pay nothing, are presented at no court, and take what the wood gives. Some are afflicted households in the ordinary sense and the wood treats them much as the fen treats its ditch families. Some are simply poor.
The woodmote does not ask about them and the not-asking is deliberate and old. The court has jurisdiction over the taking of timber, and a family living on windfall and pannage-leavings takes no timber. The priory’s income is unaffected. The regarders do not present what they are not required to present. The arrangement has held for as long as anybody can say and is the closest thing to charity the institutions of the march perform.
The verderers will say, if asked directly and in private, that the wood is better for having people in it. This is not sentiment and they will explain it in practical terms. Somebody is in the middle ground. Somebody will notice if the middle ground changes. The alternative to poor families living where the court cannot see them is a belt of wood four miles across with nobody in it at all, and the wood has enough of that already in the north.
For a company the practical point is who to ask. The verderers know the law of the wood. The regarders know its condition as of September. The woodwards know their own walks. The charcoal burners know everything, will tell a stranger very little, and will tell somebody who has bought their charcoal at a fair price and asked no questions a good deal more than the court has ever heard.
What the Wood Says Is in the North
“I have collected nine accounts and they contradict one another so completely that I have concluded the contradiction is the finding. The wood does not know what is in its own northern quarter. It has instead nine opinions, each held firmly, each by somebody with no more evidence than the next.”
Ask in the wood what is in the northern quarter and the answers divide, and a company should collect several rather than accept the first. The verderers say that the ground is simply not walked and that nothing need be in it at all, which is the position of an office that would have to act if it said anything else. The regarders say that the crows do not settle over four square miles of it and decline to go further.
The charcoal burners hold that there are things in it that breed, that they are much the same as what the fen has in its carrs, and that they have been there longer than the wood has been worked. Asked what they are, a burner will say that they are what is in the north wood, in the tone of a man naming a species, and will be puzzled by the question. The oldest of them adds that they were here first and that the wood is theirs, which the woodmote has never been asked to consider.
The priory holds a doctrine and holds it consistently across the march. It is the doctrine given in the wet country and it has the same shape here: that such creatures descend from the enemy, that their nature is settled by that descent, and that no rite reaches them. The brother who collected the northern accounts is careful to record that this position was held by his house before any of the accounts existed and is not derived from them.
The Collegium’s licensed surveyor, who has been into the northern edge twice, holds none of these. His position is that the ground is corrupted, that corruption works on ordinary stock over generations, and that what is in the north wood is a lineage of something perfectly natural that has gone wrong in the way the fells have gone wrong. He has written this up and it is the only account of the four with anything resembling a method behind it.
The families in the middle ground hold a fifth thing and will give it only to somebody they trust. Their account is that what is in the north is neither descended from anything nor corrupted from anything, that it is simply a kind of creature that lives there as a deer lives in the south wood, and that the whole question of where it came from is a question that only people from outside the wood have ever thought worth asking.
None of the five can be tested and the brother’s conclusion stands: the contradiction is the finding. A company should note that the five positions differ chiefly in what they imply about what may be done. Descent from the enemy implies extermination and no negotiation. Corruption implies containment and possibly cure. An old people implies terms. A natural kind implies husbandry. Nothing in the evidence chooses between them, and everybody in the wood is acting on one.
Going Into the Wood
“Stay on a ride. If you must leave one, leave it at a right angle and count your paces and do not turn. If you are lost, sit down. Every man I have lost in twenty years walked further after he knew he was lost, and every man I have found sat down and waited.”
The worked wood is safe, is full of people, and is pleasant travelling in any season but the wettest. A company moving through the southern half will meet cutters daily, will find lodging at the two lodges or at a burner’s hearth for a small payment, and will be able to buy food at the edge villages. No particular precaution is needed there beyond staying on the rides.
Staying on the rides is not a courtesy and every officer of the wood will say so in the same words. A ride is navigable and the wood is not. The nine rides connect, are known, and are where anybody looking for a lost party will look. A company that leaves a ride to cut a corner has entered ground where distance and direction are both unreadable, and the woodwards are unanimous that this is how every loss in the wood begins.
The middle ground is where the wood’s condition becomes uncertain and where a company should begin taking advice from the people in it rather than from the court. Two of the nine rides run into the middle ground and stop. The stopping is where the cutting stopped, is marked by nothing, and is entirely obvious when a party reaches it because the ride simply closes in ahead of them within a hundred yards.
Nobody will guide a company past that point, and the refusals are worth understanding because they differ. The verderers refuse because the ground is outside the regard and they will not send a man where the court cannot follow. The woodwards refuse because it is not their walk. The charcoal burners refuse without giving a reason and will change the subject. Nobody in the wood has ever been known to refuse on the grounds that a party would be in danger. What the burners do instead, for a party they have come to like, is give it a charm of their own making at the last hearth and say nothing about what it is for.
For a company whose commission requires the northern quarter, the wood’s advice is thin and is given honestly as thin. Go in autumn, when the leaf is off and sight lines open. Go by one of the two dead rides, which can still be followed for the first mile and a half by the line of the old cutting. Mark the way in, because the way out is not the same problem. And agree a day, and leave somebody at the last hearth to keep it.
The last piece of advice given in Wychwood is the same one given on the wold and at the fen staithes and it has been arrived at independently three times in a march that shares very little else. Whoever is waiting does not come in. The woodwards can name two occasions on which somebody waiting at a hearth went in after a party that was late, and on both occasions the party came out on its own.