Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 320

This nicely produced addition to the Hampshire Field Club papers focuses on the interactions of the commoners and squatters who lived in the New Forest with those in London who sought to manage the resources of the area for strategic reasons (timber for a wooden-hulled navy) and to provide some income for the national coffers.

Sylvia Crocker begins by putting the New Forest’s economy and society in a national context of rising population, squatter encroachments and rural de-industrialization conflicting with pressures for enclosure, agricultural improvement and increased food production. She then links the encroachment on Crown Land in the New Forest to the concept of social crime as defined by Hobsbawm and Rudé with the informal economy and rules of the forest community. She argues that unauthorized squatting took place on a small scale and was vastly overshadowed by the activities of rich owners and holders of Forest offices who degraded the Forest by grabbing land and taking wood and timber. A clear analysis of Forest administration is provided with a neat diagram, followed by an account of the measures taken to manage the taking of timber and encroachment and squatting in the Forest.

Squatters and social crime makes good use of material in the Hampshire Record Office and other local sources, and some of the material in the National Archives. Another section examines printed material from local clergy, landowners, and agricultural commentators which universally denigrated the squatters for their potential drain on welfare resources and propensity to criminality, as well as their absence from church (but not necessarily from chapel). The problems of parish welfare are highlighted with discussions of extra-parochial areas, inter-commoned land, and disputed boundaries such as Nomansland on the Wiltshire/Hampshire border which became a magnet for squatters and frustrated orderly administration. A map of 1789 provides details of where squatting was concentrated, with areas adjacent to the borders of private estates prominent.

The Crown’s attempts to enclose the Forest in the 1790s by statute were successfully repelled but a more modest regime of regulation was instituted in 1800, with attempts to discover who owned the land, and allowing those with continuous occupancy for more than 15 years to retain possession on acceptance of a lease. But it also attempted to draw a line under squatting by providing new mechanisms for informing on squatters. Those informed on were largely landowners trying to extend their property by more than the cottagers’ plots, which were generally under one acre. Squatting was not effectively extinguished.

This short booklet will provide local historians of the New Forest area with a useful overview of Forest problems, but those seeking more from this work will be disappointed. The bibliography is relatively sparse; whole topics such as E. P. Thompson’s account of forest administration and social crime in the 1720s in Whigs and hunters are ignored. Other Hampshire forests were affected by those disturbances, so why was the New Forest relatively unaffected? The rich archive of Charles Withers, the Surveyor General of the forests in the 1720s has much on the New Forest and is in Hampshire Record Office. Social crimes such as deer stealing and smuggling were pervasive in coastal and forest areas such as the New Forest. Were they un-policed? There is more to be said about social crime in the area.