The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [356]
But the aristocrats who faced him now were of a different sort. Their families mightn’t be as ancient, but they didn’t care. Their estates were far larger; they belonged to that more rarefied club that governed the country. And to them – they were too polite to say so but he saw it in their eyes – he was just a florid-faced squire.
‘Colonel Albion, you are a Commissioner, are you not, of the Deer Removal Act?’
‘I am.’ There were thirteen Commissioners whose job it was to oversee the working of the Deer Removal Act and, in particular, to approve any new inclosures. Three came from the Office of Woods, including Cumberbatch, then there were the four verderers, chosen by the county, though their power was only a shadow of what it had been in medieval times. The rest were the gentlemen or freeholders who held rights of commoning on the Forest. Albion, with extensive rights and numerous tenants, was a natural person to sit on the Commission.
‘And why, Colonel, in your view, has there grown up such opposition to the Crown?’
Opposition? Of course there had been opposition: fences broken, young plantations set on fire. These were the ways the poorer Forest folk let you know their feelings and frankly he didn’t blame them. Cumberbatch might like to characterize this as a rebellion against the monarch, but he wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
‘There has been opposition to the Office of Woods,’ he said calmly, ‘but the New Forest Commoners like myself are loyal Englishmen and have always enjoyed the special protection of the Crown. Until recently,’ he added.
‘Colonel, would you care to summarize what, in your view, have been the causes of the bad feeling in the Forest since the Deer Removal Act?’
‘Certainly.’ He might have been only a bluff soldier and country squire, he might have missed the Oxford education that his father Wyndham had enjoyed, but the statement of Colonel Godwin Albion to the Committee of the House of Lords would have made his father proud. It was concise, accurate and elegant. ‘My statement falls into two parts,’ he explained. ‘The first is political, the second material.’
It was a melancholy tale.
Why, the Colonel used to wonder, had they chosen Cumberbatch? He was far too young, only in his early twenties when he first arrived. He looked and behaved like a pugilist in the ring. He knew nothing about the Forest and cared even less. And straight away he had attacked the Forest folk with a vengeance.
His first assault had been absurd. In the days when the Forest was an actively managed deer preserve, the commoners were supposed to keep their stock off the Forest during the fence month, when the deer gave birth, and throughout the winter heyning, as the cold months were called, when food was scarce. Not that these rules had been enforced for decades. It was generally assumed that the fees the commoners paid entitled them to year-round grazing. And with the deer gone there was no possible reason to apply these medieval rules anyway. Yet no sooner had he arrived than Cumberbatch had tried to order all the stock off the Forest during these times. It was a senseless harassment which, if followed up, would have ruined most of the commoners.
Yet that had only been the beginning. Next, a new register of commoners’ rights had been compiled – essentially an update of the old register of 1670 – but with one great difference. Almost every right of common claimed, from the big claims like those of the Albion estate down to those of the smallest freeholder, was now disputed by the Crown.
‘Your Lordships, this could only lead any reasonable person to conclude that the intention was to destroy the commoners. The legal costs alone have been crippling. Yet even this is overshadowed by one other business.’
Despite the fact that the Deer Removal Act had made sweeping changes, many people still expected more drastic change to come. The reasoning was simple: if the Office of Woods and the commoners couldn’t agree about how to share the Forest, then why not partition