In the greenwood
I spent last week deep in the woods, without a reliable internet connection. It reminded me of a nifty book I read a few months ago. Oliver Rackham's Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England isn't published online, but it's worth looking up if your characters are venturing into the woods, especially if they're foresters themselves.
Rackham's work changed the way that scholars thought about medieval landscapes by demonstrating that forests themselves have documented histories. Even in the Middle Ages, England had very little wild woodland, certainly less than many other parts of Europe. Most of it had already been destroyed by the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived. Sustainable forestry practices were not only widely known, they were a necessity.
Medieval Englishmen put trees into two categories, timber and wood. Timber came from tall, mature trees and was suitable for beams, planks and gateposts. Wood, on the other hand, consisted of saplings and brushwood. It was used for wattle, fencing, firewood and charcoal-burning. Managed medieval woodland usually consisted of a combination of both types. A woodland would be divided into sections called coppices or copses where a few trees would be allowed to grow tall and straight for timber, while the rest were felled on a four- to thirty-year cycle. Each year the underwood would cleared in a different coppice on a rotating basis. Less often, timber trees would be harvested for large construction projects.
When felled, many species of trees will coppice. That is, the stump, or stool, will send up new shoots. In parts of England, there are still enormous stools that have produced crops of poles for centuries. A few species will also sucker, that is they send up new trees, called clones, from their root system. Occasionally, foresters also pollarded trees, creating a stool that was seven to eighteen feet tall so that livestock could graze underneath it without harming the new shoots. Medieval woods were often bordered by zig-zag earthworks topped with pollarded trees.
English woodlands could fall into a number of categories. Commons were common areas where groups of people had pasture rights for livestock. These could be open meadows, parkland with trees, or wooded areas where pigs could forage. The local people usually had rights to the wood there, but often the timber belonged to the lord of the region. Parks were private land where an owner kept deer, and often livestock as well. These were surrounded by a fence. Forests were like commons and might or might not contain trees. They also sheltered deer placed in them for the use of the king. As the Robin Hood legends remind us, the different uses to which woodlands were put often created conflict between their different users.
Rackham packs much, much more information into the book. If you are at all interested in medieval forests, it is well worth tracking down. To give you a sense of his vast expertise on the subject, here is the image and an excerpt from the caption that appears on the book’s frontispiece.
A woodland scene attributed to Simon Benninck, the late-medieval Flemish artist. The figures are somewhat conventionalized but the scenery is probably the most convincing picture of the interior of a wood ever painted. It is recognizable as a limewood. The underwood in the foreground was felled last year, leaving standing most of the scattered and variable timber trees of elm and oak. The felled stools are sprouting to form the next underwood crop; among them are coppicing plants which include broom, male-fern, bramble and the honeysuckle Lonicera xylosteum. The toadstool Oudemansiella radicata is parasitizing the roots of an elm. In the background tall lime underwood on big stools awaits the next felling.
ETA:The image link no longer works. It's this picture.
Rackham's work changed the way that scholars thought about medieval landscapes by demonstrating that forests themselves have documented histories. Even in the Middle Ages, England had very little wild woodland, certainly less than many other parts of Europe. Most of it had already been destroyed by the time the Anglo-Saxons arrived. Sustainable forestry practices were not only widely known, they were a necessity.
Medieval Englishmen put trees into two categories, timber and wood. Timber came from tall, mature trees and was suitable for beams, planks and gateposts. Wood, on the other hand, consisted of saplings and brushwood. It was used for wattle, fencing, firewood and charcoal-burning. Managed medieval woodland usually consisted of a combination of both types. A woodland would be divided into sections called coppices or copses where a few trees would be allowed to grow tall and straight for timber, while the rest were felled on a four- to thirty-year cycle. Each year the underwood would cleared in a different coppice on a rotating basis. Less often, timber trees would be harvested for large construction projects.
When felled, many species of trees will coppice. That is, the stump, or stool, will send up new shoots. In parts of England, there are still enormous stools that have produced crops of poles for centuries. A few species will also sucker, that is they send up new trees, called clones, from their root system. Occasionally, foresters also pollarded trees, creating a stool that was seven to eighteen feet tall so that livestock could graze underneath it without harming the new shoots. Medieval woods were often bordered by zig-zag earthworks topped with pollarded trees.
English woodlands could fall into a number of categories. Commons were common areas where groups of people had pasture rights for livestock. These could be open meadows, parkland with trees, or wooded areas where pigs could forage. The local people usually had rights to the wood there, but often the timber belonged to the lord of the region. Parks were private land where an owner kept deer, and often livestock as well. These were surrounded by a fence. Forests were like commons and might or might not contain trees. They also sheltered deer placed in them for the use of the king. As the Robin Hood legends remind us, the different uses to which woodlands were put often created conflict between their different users.
Rackham packs much, much more information into the book. If you are at all interested in medieval forests, it is well worth tracking down. To give you a sense of his vast expertise on the subject, here is the image and an excerpt from the caption that appears on the book’s frontispiece.
A woodland scene attributed to Simon Benninck, the late-medieval Flemish artist. The figures are somewhat conventionalized but the scenery is probably the most convincing picture of the interior of a wood ever painted. It is recognizable as a limewood. The underwood in the foreground was felled last year, leaving standing most of the scattered and variable timber trees of elm and oak. The felled stools are sprouting to form the next underwood crop; among them are coppicing plants which include broom, male-fern, bramble and the honeysuckle Lonicera xylosteum. The toadstool Oudemansiella radicata is parasitizing the roots of an elm. In the background tall lime underwood on big stools awaits the next felling.
ETA:The image link no longer works. It's this picture.