Forests and Chases of England and Wales c.1500-c.1850

Forests and chases were bounded areas where a legal regime separate from the Common Law protected royal and aristocratic hunting privileges and commoners' rights. Their survival and their history after the Middle Ages is little recorded, yet forest law and customs continued into Victoria's reign, and some still do. In this volume, historians, geographers, ecologists, archaeologists and environmental managers investigate the survival of forests and how they may best be managed in today's world. Revised edition, 2008.

Table of Contents

List of figures; Foreword; The Porposal: Forests and Chases in England and Wales, c.1500 to c. 1850: survey and analysis; Forests in early-modern England and Wales: History and historiography (John Langton); Forest maps and the gazeteer (Graham Jones ); Parliamentary surveys (David Fletcher); Mapping forests and chases, c.1530 to c.1670 (Elizabeth Baigent); Parliament, peers, and legislation (Ruth Paley); Customary rights and charities (Sylvia Pinches); Encroachment in the Forest of Dean: settlement, economy and landscape change at the margin (Paul Coones); Swanimotes, woodmotes and courts of 'free miners' (Graham Jones); Resistence, crime and popular cultures (Carl Griffin); Forests and religious dissidence: Supremacy to toleration (Marie Rowlands); Gypsies, Tinkers, Travellers and the forest economy (David Smith); Ownership and ecological change (Caroline Cheeseman); Transitional hunting landscapes: deer hunting and fox hunting (Mandy de Belin); Woodland fuel, demand and supply (Paul Warde); State management and 'scientific forestry' (Graham Jones); Bringewood Chase and its surrounding countryside: a GIS survey (David Lovelace); A digital atlas of Rockingham Forest (Glenn Foard, David Hall, Tracey Britnell); Roundtable discussion and comments; Bibliography; Index.