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Domesday Woodland in Southwest England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

F. W. Morgan
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Extract

The distribution of woodland and the stages of its gradual disappearance were of fundamental importance in the early historical geography of England. Wood was a valuable element in medieval economy and one of the chief factors affecting the nature of settlement, The evidence concerning the extent of the woodland in early England is of two kinds : (1) the surface geology, which provides a basis for the reconstruction of the original extent ; (2) the statistics of the Domesday Book: these refer to the eleventh century, but they may have some retrospective value. The present essay is an attempt to examine the Domesday evidence for the south and south-western counties of Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 10 , Issue 39 , September 1936 , pp. 306 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1936

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References

1 Tansley, A.G. Types of British Vegetation (1911), 76, 89, 148.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Emphasized by Sir Cyril, Fox, The Personality of Britain (2nd ed. 1933), 49.Google Scholar

3 Wooldridge, S.W. and Linton, D.L. ‘The Loam-Terrains of Southeast England in their Relation to its Early History’, ANTIQUITY 1933 7, 297.Google Scholar

4 As in the Ordnance Survey Maps, Roman Britain (2nd edition, 1928), and Britain in the Dark Ages (South sheet, 1935). In the latter the forest distribution of the Roman map was employed, the reason given being that clearing between the Roman period and 871 must have been almost negligible.

5 ‘Blossom Gatherings out of St. Augustine’, Brit. Museum, Vit. A, XV. f. I; see Seebohm, F. The English Village Community (1883), 169.Google Scholar

6 61t is often assumed that where such settlement has advanced into clay land (woodland) it has become scattered. This undoubtedly occurred frequently, and an examination of the earliest one-inch sheets of the Ordnance Survey (1809–0), which are invaluable for this purpose, will show that scattered settlement is generally true of areas of Eocene beds and Clay-with-Flints, e.g. mid and south Berkshire and north and northwest Hampshire. But on the heavy clays there is much less coincidence—for example, the sixteen villages on the Gault and Kimmeridge Clays of the Vale of White Horse are almost entirely compact, and in the extensive cleared areas of Lias Clay in Somerset around Ilchester and on the Polden Hills, there is little scattering, though in a small area on the Dorset Lias there is a good deal. (Sheets 12, 13, 18, 19, 21).

7 Stenton, F.M. Introduction to the Survey of English Place-Names (1929) vol.1, part I, 39–40.Google Scholar

8 D.B., I, 68. The reference is to the volume and folio in the Domesday Book, Record Commission edition, vols, 1, 11 (ed. Abraham Farley), 1783 ; vols, in, iv (ed. Henry Ellis), 1816. Vol. 1 contains the Exchequer Domesday, for the greater part of England, and vol. in includes the Exon Domesday.

9 D.B., r, 68. Five hundred years later, in the same village of South Newton, the tenants had to undertake the transport of timber to the lord's seat at Wilton : Roxburghe Club, ‘Survey of the Lands of William First Earl of Pembroke’, ed. C. R. Straton, (1909), 31

10 Round, J.H. IV. C. H. Berkshire (1906), 1, 310.Google Scholar

11 SeeDarby, H.C. (1) ‘Domesday Woodland in East Anglia, ANTIQUITY (1934), 14, 211;Google Scholar (2) ‘The Domesday Geography of Norfolk and Suffolk, Geog. fourn. (1935), 85, 432;Google Scholar (3) Studies in the HistoricalGeography of England before 1800 (1936), 200–202.Google Scholar

12 e.g. Windsor. D.B., 1, 56b.

13 D.B., I, 58.

14 D.B., I, 45b.

15 D.B., I, 64b.

16 D.B., I, 92.

17 Maitland, F.W. Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), 373–6.Google Scholar

18 Ibid. 371, and Reichel, 0.J. in V.C.H. Devon (1909), 1, 387.Google Scholar

19 Monasticon Anglicanum, 3, 241.Google Scholar

20 Northants, V.C.H. (1902), 1, 279–281.Google Scholar

21 Maitland, F.W. op. cit. 371, 432.Google Scholar

22 D.B., i, 91.

23 D.B., I, 86.

24 D.B., I, 91.

25 D.B., 1, 92.

26 e.g. D.B., 1, 64b.

27 Reichel, 0.J. op. cit. 387 andGoogle Scholar Eyton, R.W. Key to Domesday Dorset (1878), 31.Google Scholar

28 This method was first employed by DrDarby, H.C. in ‘Domesday Woodland in Huntingdonshire’, Trans. Camb. and Hunts. Archaeol. Soc. (1935), 5, 269.Google Scholar

29 SeeBazeley, M.L. ‘The Extent of the English Forest in the Thirteenth Century’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. (1921), ser. 4, 4, 148.Google Scholar For a general account of forests see Darby, H.C. Studies in the Historical Geography of England before 1800 (1936), 173–8.Google Scholar

30 Crawford, O.G.S. ‘Primitive English Land-marks and Maps’, Empire Survey Review (1931), 1, 9.Google Scholar

31 For the creation of the New Forest see Baring, F.H. Domesday Tables (1909), 194–205.Google Scholar

32 Cox, J.C. The Royal Forests of England (1905), 69–70.Google Scholar

33 In the construction of these maps (i) the entries in acres have been plotted in the same way as rectangles of equal size; (2) in those few entries where a wood is described as ‘X leagues in length and breadth’ the leagues have been taken as areal leagues of 120 acres each, following Reichel, O.J. and Eyton, R.W. op. cit. (a decision has to be made arbitrarily, and in a paper, ‘Woodland in Wiltshire at the Time of the Domesday Book’, Wilts. Arch, and N. H. Mag. (1935), 47, 25, the formula was taken to mean the sum of the length and breadth); (3) the sign ‘F’ has been inserted on the sites of the later forests (see M. L. Bazeley, op. cit.); it must be remembered that the forest of Exmoor was less likely than the others to have contained trees.Google Scholar

34 See also Baring’s, F.H. map of the New Forest, op. cit. 197.Google Scholar

35 Barings, F.H. op. cit. 141, remarks on north Berkshire, without adducing any evidence, ‘There is at least strong ground for suspicion that the entire absence of any mention ofwoodland in these hundreds was due, not always to nature, but also to omission in the returns’, and suggests that near the Thames the area ‘must have been well furnished with woods’.Google Scholar

36 Morgan, F.W. ‘The Domesday Geography of Berkshire’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1935), 51, 353.Google Scholar

* Based upon fig. 3 (Pannage Dues), Morgan, F.W. ‘The Domesday Geography of Berkshire’, Scottish Geographical Magazine (1935), 51, 357, by permission of the Acting Editor, Royal Scottish Geographical SocietyGoogle Scholar

37 Morgan, F.W. ‘Woodland in Wiltshire at the time of the Domesday Book’, WiZts. Arch. and N.H. Mag. (1935), 47, 25.Google Scholar

38 Gover, J.E.B. Mawer, A. Stenton, F.M. Place-Name Survey of Devonshire (1931), 15.Google Scholar

39 It is interesting to note that at the end of the eighteenth century a report of the Board of Agriculture stated that ‘ there is a good deal of coppice wood in the county of Cornwall, but little timber. Formerly the tin was smelted only with charcoal ; and this made them cut down their woods and keep them only in coppice … there is no doubt that timber will thrive as well in many parts of Cornwall as in other counties ’ Gover, J.E.B. Fraser, R. General View of the County of Cornwall (Board of Agriculture, 1794), 59.Google Scholar

40 General Introduction to Domesday Book (1833), 1, 100–101.Google Scholar

41 Salzmann, L.F. and others V.C.H.: Cornwall Domesday (1924), 56.Google Scholar

42 D.B., in, 203.

43 Ibid. 199b, 200.

44 Ibid. 93b.

45 Ibid. 94b.

46 e.g. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, no. 513 (A.D. 866): ’LXX porcis saginam in commone illa salvatica (silvática ?) taxatione … ’

47 op. cit.. 71.

48 Morgan, F.W. op. cit. Google Scholar Darby, H.C. ‘Domesday Woodland in East Anglia’, ANTIQUITY (1934), 14, 214.Google Scholar

49 These spaces would be larger if a league of less than 12 furlongs be assumed