The English royal forest: A communication of power and politics

Just after his conquest of England in 1066, the Norman king William I created a royal institution in its forests—complete with its own laws, courts, and infrastructure. Scholarship holds that William's love for hunting motivated him to “afforest” and finds a combination of economic and demographic factors responsible for his successors' maintaining, and expanding, the institution. Norman and Angevin kings especially reaped substantial revenue from fees charged for forest use, fines charged for forest abuse, and from their monopoly over valuable forest resources. By the fourteenth century, other sources of income (the wool staple and wartime taxation) became available to English kings. As they found it less profitable to maintain the royal forest, kings allowed their control in the forests to decline.;While this view of the royal forest's trajectory has merit, it cannot explain why Anglo-Saxon kings—who also loved hunting and had every reason to exploit the forest's economic potential—did not engage in afforestation. The current literature also ignores the deep symbolic meaning that forests held throughout English political history, as places that protected and defined Englishness. This dissertation offers an alternative account of the royal forest's significance, emphasizing its political significance at key moments in its development.;Norman kings institutionalized the English forest to physically project power over the island they had invaded and to communicate a redefinition of the connection between king and land, from a relationship that expressed Englishness to one that expressed rulership. However, once kings turned the forest into a medium through which to communicate their intentions and desires, they could not prevent others from joining the conversation. As the mechanisms that enforced royal power faltered in the later middle ages, the royal forest became ever more susceptible to political challenges. Reformists in the thirteenth-century made a king's adherence to the Forest Charter a measure of his government's integrity. A fourteenth-century protest piece, The Outlaw's Song of Traillebaston, uses the forest to criticize royal justice and those who dispensed it. These voices subvert the message of power that Norman kings communicated when they turned geography into privilege and jurisdiction. Kings and parliaments would put each other to the test over the forest for centuries to follow, most dramatically during the civil war of the seventeenth century.