The Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

laws were harsh. There were two overall categories of offence: those called
vert
and those termed
venison
. The
vert
concerned vegetation – forbiddingthe chopping down of trees, the making of inclosures, anything that could damage the habitat of the king’s deer. These were the lesser offences. The
venison
crimes concerned the poaching of game and, most especially, deer. The Conqueror’s penalty for killing a deer had been blinding. Rufus had gone even further: a peasant who killed a stag must suffer death. The forest laws were hated.
    But there were still the ancient common rights of the Forest folk; and these the Conqueror left largely intact and even, in places, extended. In Pride’s hamlet, for instance, though a piece of land beside his homestead had been taken under forest law – which Pride regarded as an imposition – except during certain prohibited periods of the year, he could turn out as many ponies and cattle as he pleased to graze all over the king’s Forest; in the autumn his pigs could forage on the rich crop of fresh acorns; he also had the right to cut turves for his peat fire, gather fallen wood, of which there was always plenty, and to carry home bracken as bedding for his animals.
    Technically, Godwin Pride was termed a copyholder. The local noble who now held Oakley hamlet was his feudal lord. Did this mean that he had to go out and plough the lord’s land three days a week and bow his head if his lord passed? Not at all. There were no great manorial fields; this was the Forest. True, he put marl on the lord’s small field, paid some modest feudal dues, such as a few pence for the pigs he kept, and helped if there was wood to be carted. But these were more like rents for his smallholding. He lived, in practice, just as his ancestors had done, minding his holding, and earning useful extra money in occasional labour connected with the king’s hunting and the maintenance of his forest. He was practically a free man.
    The forest smallholders did not live so badly. Were they grateful? Of course not. Godwin Pride, faced with this foreign interference, had done what people in such circumstances have done through the ages. First he had raged; then grumbled; finally he had come to a resentful compromise laced with contempt. And then he had settled down, quietly and methodically, to beat the system. This, watched nervously by his wife, was what he was doing this morning.
    He had been a child when the land by his family’s homestead had been taken into the king’s New Forest. Just beside their little barn, however, a small strip of about a quarter-acre had been left for them. This was used as a pen where the family’s livestock could be kept and fed in the months when they were not allowed on the Forest. Around it was a fence. But the pen was really not big enough.
    Every year, therefore, in the spring when the animals were back on the Forest, Godwin Pride enlarged it.
    Not by much. He was very careful. Just a few feet at a time. First, during the night, he would move the fence. That was the easy part. Then, as the light came up, he would go over the ground minutely, filling in and masking the place where the fence had been before, and using turves he had secretly cut in advance, where necessary, returfing the area he had taken over. By early morning it was very hard to see what he had done. But, to be safe, he would immediately put the pigs on that section. A few weeks of the pigs using it and the ground would be too messy to see anything. The next year the same thing again: imperceptibly the pen was growing.
    It was illegal, of course. Chopping down trees or stealing a piece of the king’s land was a crime of
vert
. A tiny encroachment like this, termed a
purpresture
, was not a serious offence, but a punishable crime all the same. It was also, to Pride, a secret blow for freedom.
    Normally he would have finished long before this time and the pigs would already have been moved in with as much