Royal and non-royal forests and chases in England and Wales

Abstract

Royal forests comprised land devoted primarily to hunting. They were a distinctive feature of Norman and Angevin England and Wales. Expressing the crown's arbitrary power to prevent holders of land from using it as they chose, they were generally resented. Royal forests must disappear to enable individuals to utilize landholdings for their own private economic purposes, and so for commercially oriented land uses to occur. However, it is shown here that ‘royal forests’ did not constitute a hermetic historiographical category, distinct from non-royal ‘chases’. There were royal chases as well as royal forests; monarchs had private forests and chases as well as royal ones; and non-royal earls, barons and high churchmen possessed and created forests and chases of their own, which were as well protected and displayed the same non-economic imperatives and cultural consequences as those of the crown. They were not a transient feature of medieval times which inevitably disappeared with the inexorable progress of commercial economy. Some of them continued to flourish, in all their distinctiveness, through early modern times into the nineteenth century. In consequence, the transition between the medieval and modern worlds was not as clear-cut nor as complete as is suggested by the conventional narrative of English historical development.

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