Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 296

Forests in the legal sense have a particular fascination for historians, for they are places apart, different in their landscapes, ecology and economy, certainly different in their legal systems. Moreover, they have largely disappeared, any woodland cover felled, the land apportioned and turned into arable or most likely pasture. As John Broad showed some years ago in work on the Forest of Bernwood in Buckinghamshire, a disafforested forest can cast a long shadow over the parishes in which the forest lay. Its impression does not go away.

Forests were a crown perquisite in the High Middle Ages. Attempts to widen their boundaries produced complaints which were largely resolved in the early thirteenth century. Much of the early history of the forests is therefore that of their swelling and contraction and of contests over their boundaries. This is true of Braydon as elsewhere. In the early seventeenth century, James I and Charles I certainly had more forests than they needed. There were too many which had rarely – if ever – seen a king but where a structure of offices was maintained, lodges were occasionally repaired in case the king might come and the system of forest courts continued to operate (after a fashion) to protect the royal interest. They also tended to be poached and the timber illicitly felled. Disafforestation released some value from these assets. Forests were cleared of woods and deer, the land in part allocated to those who could demonstrate common rights, the remainder sold or granted to suitors. This, of course, brought to an end the institutional history of a forest: it is perhaps surprising that so much record material has survived.

This book starts with what almost amounts to an apology. It is not a single text with an introduction of a sort which forms the staple of record series publications, but an attempt to gather together all the extant material on the Forest of Braydon in Wiltshire. If it is a departure for the Wiltshire Record Series, then it is also a welcome innovation in the historiography of Forests. On its own terms it must be considered a success and a very welcome addition to the literature. In form it consists of a very long introduction (188 pages) covering the history of the forest from the earliest references to disafforestation in the late 1620s and early 1630s and then documents (a mere 175 pages). Latin documents are printed in English translation: English documents are not printed verbatim but in a form of reduced transcript. The scholarship involved is not to be questioned. The labour involved in locating and transcribing materials cannot but be admired.

And yet one wonders whether the book is quite the success that it might have been. The documents printed in the second section are discussed in the first half of the book: there is an element of repetition. But most curiously, there are no cross-references between the two, so archival references are given in the introduction but one has to hunt through the texts to see if the document being cited is printed there. (Not all of them are.) The introduction sticks very closely to the documents. At some points the detail is overwhelming, and the reader’s comprehension is not helped by the lack of maps. There is no suggestion that parallels might be sought with other forests in Wiltshire or nationally, and one suspects that Crowley knows neither Buchanan Sharpe’s work nor an essay on the improvement of the crown lands I published in 1992 (and the latter [rev. ante 42.1] would have given him some references that he might have usefully followed up). Neither appears to be cited. As regards Sharp’s work, there is no interest on Crowley’s part in the riots in the forest with which the former was chiefly concerned. These are small but important omissions but add to a sense that the book is inward-looking: one would never guess from it that the history of Braydon mirrors that of many other forests. It is a work which will be most useful to Wiltshire historians but also those interested in the history, and especially the final years, of a royal forest.