The Charter also granted smallholders rights to farm: “Henceforth every freeman, in his wood or on his land that he has in the forest, may with impunity make a mill, fish-preserve, pond, marl-pit, ditch or arable in cultivated land outside coverts, provided that no injury is thereby given to any neighbour”. At a time when the royal forests were the most important source of food, fuel and wood for the production of craft items, it guaranteed rights to Herbage (gathering berries and herbs), pannage (pasture for pigs), estover (wood to build homes, make tools & for firewood), agistment (grazing), turbary (cutting of turf for fuel), and the collecting of honey. The Charter guaranteed access to the land for common people to forage, graze their animals, farm and gather wood for fuel, building & industry. In ‘The Magna Carta Manifesto, Liberties and Commons for All’, radical historian Peter Linebaugh sets out how Magna Carta secured liberties, but he shows that it was the Charter of the Forest that secured economic rights to the ‘commons’, and how vital these were. Legal research indicates it was conflicts over access to the land, and the prevention of enclosures in particular, that drove demands for justice and for both the charters to be accepted by kings, barons, and the church. Copies were distributed throughout the kingdom, to be read aloud in churches.įinally both charters were incorporated into statute in 1297. As a result both the charters were revised and re-issued several times throughout the 13th century, as peace treaties to settle civil war. This fuelled ongoing conflict and the repeated Barons Wars. Kings continued to seize land, in part to raise taxes to fund the Crusades. Successive kings, with early support from the Pope, either reneged on the Magna Carter & Charter of the Forest agreements, or simply ignored their provisions. One of the major conflicts that raged throughout the 13 th Century, and beyond, resulted from the continued enclosure of land.
Special Verderers Courts ( Eyres) were set up in the forests to enforce the laws of the Charter, and this enabled common people to seek justice, as recounted in the tale of Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow:ġ52a.3 ‘Why’ quoth the king,’what shall I do? The Charter of the Forest established the rule of law within the Royal Forests. One of the clauses of the Magna Carta, which gave rise to the Charter of the Forest, removed from office the Sheriff of Nottingham and his family. These are tales of brave resistance in a brutal time–a folk-lore history that attests to rebel heroes resisting the arbitrary authority of the king’s agents in the forest. The Robin Hood legends are set in this period and tell of feasting on the venison in the Greenwood, and of evading the Sherriff of Nottingham in the Royal Forest. Before the agreement, hunting for deer was punishable by death or castration, and the blinding of poachers.
The Charter of the Forest also put an end to cruel and unusual punishments and arbitrary fines. Huge tracts of land were turned into Royal Forest, including most of Essex. From the time of William the Conqueror the Norman kings had enclosed more and more land, for hunting and for levying tax receipts and fines for war. More than that, it required the king (Henry III) to give up the parts of the royal forest lands (disafforestation) that had been seized by the previous kings Richard and John. It prevented the King and his agents from continuously enclosing the common land (aforrestation). Charter of the Forest 1225 reissue held by the British Library
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