Since writing on Seeing the Woods for the Trees, I have read Charles R. Young’s paper on ‘The Royal Forests of Medieval England’, which takes a very different approach from Rackham’s book.  Young’s Introduction, in particular, concentrates on textual approaches to the Forest, and mentions the ‘ancient woods’ and ‘darkness and gloom’ which met the Norman invaders (p. 1). He largely associates forest with areas of woodland, but acknowledges the importance of the imposition of Forest law and mentions the ‘harsh reality of the royal forest law introduced by the Normans’ (p. 1) and quotes from Dorothy Whitelock’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘Powerful men complained of it and poor men lamented it’ (p. 3; p. 165 in Whitelock ed). Forests were also, however, places of refuge, mentioned even in Beowulf and while Gawain faced perils in the forest (in Gawain and the Green Knight) Chaucer described ‘pleasant forest places’. According to Young, the forest as the refuge of the hero Robin Hood is ‘fully understandable only in reference to the royal forest laws which they daily flouted by killing the King’s deer’ (p. 2).

While forests tended to be established in areas of woodland, they included areas with villages and open spaces.  (more…)

How wooded was Essex in the early thirteenth century? Writers such as W. G. Hoskins, considered the father of landscape archaeology, state that it was ‘heavily wooded’, at least in the eleventh century; Nicholas Crane mentions the ‘continued existence of woodland’ in the south-east to explain the lack of nucleated villages here when elsewhere the open field system developed; villages and the open field system is a topic I shall return to. Most authoritative is the study of woodland in Oliver Rackham’s ‘classic history of Britain’s landscape, flora and fauna’, The History of the Countryside, which uses East Anglia as one of its main areas of study. Rackham uses information in the Domesday Book to calculate that throughout England in the late eleventh century about 35% of land was arable 15% was woodland, 1% was meadow and probably 30% was pasture. He later suggests that this 15% coverage by woodland had reduced to 10% by 1350 (pp. 16 & 88). The period we are interested in lies in between these two dates.

Of course, what is meant by ‘woodland’ is open to interpretation. (more…)

A trip to Cambridge University Library unearthed an article by J. H. Round on ‘The Manor of Colne Engaine’ published in the Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society in 1903. Round starts by paying tribute to the work of Morant on the history of Essex but adds, ‘more than a century and a half has elapsed since Morant wrote, and there are naturally cases in which fuller knowledge and easier access to records enable us to correct the earlier descent of Essex manors as given in his work’. This might also reasonably be said of the century since Round wrote, but his account of the acquisition of the manor of Parva Colun by Richard Engaine, and thence Vitalis, is in accord with that of the 2001 account in the History of the County of Essex, (more…)

The story of who Vitalis, or Viel, Engaine, the lord of the manor in 1219, was is the first thing to sort out, and there are at least three accounts which differ. It seems difficult to reconcile them:

Vernon Clarke in 1986 wrote ‘Richard de Engaine of Blatherswick, Northants. became connected with Little Colum [or  Parvum Colum, the name of Colne Engaine before the Engaine name was adopted] when he married Sarah, Lady of Colne (d 1222), daughter of Aubrey de Vere, 1st Earl of Oxford. Their son Vitalis (Viel) de Engaine (d 1248) bought 40 acres of land at Little Colum in 1218. The 1974 Colne Engaine: Story of an Essex Village, revised in 1992, starts further back, with Robert Malet who owned Little Colne at the time of the Domesday book. According to this account, his estates were confiscated and handed to Alberic de Vere, from where Little Colne passed to the de Monchensys of Suffolk. (more…)