The Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 atime. 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 general mess as possible. But today, because of the big deer drive, he saw no need to hurry. The king’s servants would all be up at Lyndhurst where the deer would be caught.
    There were several woodland settlements in the middle section of the Forest. First there was Lyndhurst with its deer trap. Since
hurst
in Anglo-Saxon meant ‘wood’, the name probably signified that a grove of lime trees had once grown there. From Lyndhurst a track led south through ancient woodland until, after four miles, it reached the village in a break in the woods known as Brockenhurst, where there was a hunting lodge in which the king liked to stay. From there the track continued south beside a small river running down in a tiny, steep valley, past the village of Boldre, where there was a small church, towards the coast. The little hamlet containing Pride’s homestead lay over a mile to the east of this river and nearly four miles south of Brockenhurst, at a point where the belt of ancient woodlandgave on to a large heath. Even as the crow flies, the hamlet was nearly seven miles away from Lyndhurst.
    The huntsmen, he knew, were going to drift the deer down from the north into the trap. Every one of the king’s Forest servants would be up there; none of them would be coming down his way that morning.
    With an almost deliberate slowness, therefore, he was taking his time, inwardly chuckling to himself at his wife’s anxiety and