The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [152]
Albion gazed at the tree with pleasure. He had a particular interest in trees.
The New Forest and its administration had not changed greatly in the last four hundred years. The royal deer were still protected; the midsummer fence month still in force; the verderers still held courts and the foresters their bailiwicks. From time to time, also, gentlemen regarders – knights of the county often as not – would survey and check the Forest boundaries, although a steady trickle of small land grants to private individuals down the generations had made this a more complex task than it had been in olden times. But one change had been taking place. It was subtle, sometimes vague, yet increasingly present.
No one could say exactly when it had begun, but there had been an informal management of the trees in the Forest for centuries. The woodland crop was important: rods, poles, branches for wattle fencing, brushwood, fuel for fires and for charcoal. The trees supplied so many of man’s needs. Most of the supply came from the smaller trees and bushes like the hazel and holly. To obtain straight poles from a hazel, for instance, it would be cut just above the ground, causing it to send up multiple shoots which could be harvested every few years. This process was known as coppicing. More rarely, with oak trees, a similar cutting took place about six feet up, causing a mass of spreading shoots to emerge. This was termed pollarding, and the resulting tree with its stocky trunk and fan of branches was known as a pollard oak.
The only trouble with coppicing was that, when you had cut the underwood, the deer and other forest stock would come and eat up all the new shoots, destroying the whole process. And so the practice had grown up of inclosing small areas, usually with a low earth wall and a fence, to keep the animals out for three years or so, until the new shoots were too sturdy to be eaten. These inclosures were known as coppices.
A century earlier, just before the Tudors came to the English throne, an act of parliament had finally regulated the coppices. Inclosures could be made under licence and fenced for three years to allow regeneration. Since then the period had been extended to a generous nine years. These coppices were valuable and were leased out.
But beyond this activity there was the question of timber – of the felling of whole trees for the construction of large buildings, ships or other of the king’s works. In ages past there had been little need for timber from the New Forest, although huge trees might be provided for a cathedral church or other great project from time to time. But as building activity slowly rose in the Tudor period, the royal treasury began to look more carefully to see what income could be derived from its timber. In 1540, King Henry VIII had appointed a surveyor general to oversee the income, including that from timber, from all the royal woodlands, with a woodward for each county where the royal woodlands lay. The New Forest was not only, nowadays, a preserve for the king’s deer; very gradually the faint consciousness was stealing through the glades that it might also be a huge store of royal trees.
A few years earlier, Albion had managed to get himself appointed as the woodward for the New Forest. This had brought him some extra income; it had also caused him to learn a good deal more than he had ever known about trees. He had even become quite interested in them for their own sake. He looked with approval and even admiration, therefore, at the stately old oak.
It was a great, spreading oak; although its spread came naturally, and not from any pollarding. It was also famous. The first reason for its fame was that, situated some three miles or so north of Lyndhurst, it was one of the three curious trees that broke into leaf for a week at Christmas. But even this magical fact was not all for, somewhere in its long life, it had acquired a second reputation.