From the Forest Read online

  Forest Law was imposed from above. It was also new, replacing older customs, and it emanated directly from the foreign conqueror; it was different from the old well-known and well-understood laws which, however severe, had the comfortable force of tradition behind them. Not surprisingly, then, afforestation caused bitter anger, at all levels of society. A limitation on the right to afforest was one of the causes addressed by the noblemen who drew up Magna Carta in 1215, devoting four clauses of the document to the matter, including demands that ‘All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly’; and ‘All evil customs relating to forests . . . are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.’

  The New Forest, which William the Conqueror afforested in 1079, was created out of a wide swathe of what is now Hampshire – then, as it still is, a rich mixture of ancient woodland, open heath and coast. In order to establish good hunting grounds, the residents were evicted and communities destroyed, although the 36 parishes of tradition must be an exaggeration – the soil was always poor and infertile here, so the land can never have supported such a thriving agricultural population.

  There was deep resentment. As is common with folklore, this sense of grievance grew until, in the seventeenth century, Richard Blome recorded:William the Conqueror (for the making of the said Forest a harbour for Wild-beasts for his Game) caused 36 Parish Churches, with all the Houses thereto belonging, to be pulled down, and the poor Inhabitants left succourless of house or home. But this wicked act did not long go unpunished, for his Sons felt the smart thereof; Richard being blasted with a pestilent Air; Rufus shot through with an Arrow; and Henry his Grand-child, by Robert his eldest son, as he pursued his Game, was hanged among the boughs, and so dyed.

  William Rufus’s death remains mysterious – an unsolved assassination or an unfortunate accident. It is the sort of event that feels as though it belonged more to a fairy story or legend than to history.

  Throughout Europe this centralising power of the monarchy cut deep into rural life. The response of the ‘old’ pre-conquest landed class, if they did not join the new order and reap its rewards, was armed resistance. In England, Hereward the Wake is perhaps the most famous rebel. In alliance with some highly dubious Viking invaders, he sacked Peterborough Abbey and then hid out in the Fens, waging a kind of guerrilla warfare until he was defeated on the Isle of Ely in 1071. The North-East proved particularly hard to subdue (as usual), the landed classes there having a long history of independence and of claiming special freedoms, particularly from taxation, for themselves, as ‘the patrimony of St Cuthbert’. The huge, stern cathedral in Durham, one of the great works of Norman architecture and designed to house the shrine of the saint, was founded in 1093 to ‘buy off’ the recalcitrant northern earls.

  These were conservative rebellions – they were against ‘new’ laws and the new style of monarchy. They were not ‘revolutions’, or radical struggles for rights and privileges for those who had never had them, they were insurrections against change. They were the resistance of those who had been doing well out of the old system and wished it to continue.

  From this perspective, Forest Law did something else, something inverted and strange. As well as preserving wildwood and forest from the onslaught of agriculture, Forest Law created a uniquely useable space where the illegal could become the heroic. Resisting Forest Law was a crime not against one’s neighbours but against an invisible centralised government; not against the common traditions that, however unwelcome, bound communities together, but against a distant authority, and one whose legitimacy could be questioned under the rules of the old dispensation. The forest was thus not only one of the things that these malcontents were contesting, it also became the place into which they could escape in order to contest it at all.

  Efficient slave cultures need open land: it has to be difficult to run away. Egypt, for example, is perfect for this purpose – the chances of disappearing off into the desert are slim: escapees can be spotted from miles away, and if the owners do not catch them, the desert will probably kill them. Forests are precisely the opposite – they are very good places to hide. Slip away between the trees, lurk in the greenwood, vanish into the thickets of wild wood: step outside the laws that bind you to the present and you become the Out Law – the free hero of romance and folk tale.

  The most famous of these outlaws is Robin Hood, who probably never existed at all – legend, anecdote and fantasy create composite characters who come to represent a whole idea. But such characters, the heroes of folk legend, are usually based on some sort of reality, and there is no reason to think that Robin Hood is an exception. In this sense, these legends are very different from fairy stories and more related to literary romance. The developed story of Robin Hood epitomises all the arguments here.5 He was a landholder, a minor nobleman, Robin of Locksley Hall, and in some accounts even the Earl of Huntingdon. He was treated unjustly by ‘bad’ King John and his wicked place-man the Sherriff of Nottingham while the ‘good’ king, Richard the Lionheart, was off fighting the crusade, so he fled into the forest and became an outlaw, but an outlaw seeking personal restitution, not social change. Meanwhile, he lived free, he ‘robbed from the rich to give to the poor’, he supported the oppressed and was true to the ‘real’ king. It was not the law, but the abuse of the law that he resisted. From early on, accounts of Robin Hood present him as ‘merry’ and courteous – with a particular respect for women – and as an excellent archer, but also as a ‘natural leader’ (officer class) who inspired to-die-for (often literally) loyalty from his men, who were all his social inferiors; these accounts also present a romantic and sunny forest, where Maid Marion can be treated like a princess and where excellent dinner parties can be thrown for friendly visitors.

  This sense of the forest as both the place of oppression and the place to avoid or punish oppression goes very deep and still remains strangely resonant. Running away, camping out and living off the land have all kept their romantic heroism, even as children are more ‘cabin’d, cribbed and confined’6 than they have ever been before.

  The admiration for the noble and somehow free outlaw has left a strange shadow on our consciousness: poaching is treated as different from other forms of theft. At a cultural level, one great and continuing myth is that ‘natural products’ are free and should be freely available to everyone with the energy and wit to go and find them:7 ‘scrumping’ apples may be ‘naughty’, but it isn’t bad, while stealing fruit from a shop is criminal. This extends to poaching game as well. The contradiction is made explicit in Tom Brown’s School Days, of all unexpected places. Our hero and his friends have spent a day in the woods, climbing trees and collecting birds’ eggs (this shows they are good, healthy, ‘manly’ types). On the way home they fall foul of a farmer who accuses them of stealing his hens – although they are in fact innocent on this occasion. A helpful prefect, Holmes, ‘who was one of the best boys in the school’, arrives by chance on the scene and, in an extremely high-handed manner, liberates them from rustic arrest. However, once away from the menial farmer’s impertinent attempts to protect his own property, Homes goes on to lecture them:Knocking over other people’s chickens and running off with them is stealing. It’s a nasty word but that’s the plain English of it. If the chickens were dead and lying in a shop you wouldn’t take them, I know that, any more than you would apples out of Griffith’s basket; but there’s no real difference between chickens running about and apples on a tree, and the same articles in a shop. I wish our morals were sounder in such matters.8

  But it does no good – Tom and his companions are briefly chastened, but go back to poaching and bird theft, apparently with the amused tolerance of their usually highly moralistic creator. Regardless of the law, in a different, imagined parallel world the outlaw-in-the-forest has imbued the poacher with a romantic freedom, even a sort of virtue.9 Sneaking off into the forest and living by your wi
ts permeates literature. In John McNab, 10 John Buchan has members of the Cabinet poaching, to the ultimate amusement and admiration of the land owners (and also, therefore, in the twentieth century, the deer and salmon owners) themselves. It is one of the mainstays of children’s adventure stories: from Children of the New Forest to Enid’s Blyton’s Famous Five, poaching is presented as a noble sport and a mark of desirable independence. BB in Brendon Chase and Roald Dahl in Danny, the Champion of the World make poaching an heroic or at least an endearing act, in a way that ‘stealing’ never is. The young Charles Stewart (the future Charles II), hiding up an oak tree with a price on his head, suddenly stops being a pampered tyrant and becomes a loveable hero: he has escaped into the forest and become an outlaw. The strange wave of popular support that the thuggish Raoul Moat attracted in 2010, despite being a murderer (and blinding policemen), feels to me as though it was related to the fact that he ran off and hid from the law in the woods.

  Outlawry is an expression of a fundamental freedom which is to be found in the forest. But it is a conservative and regressive romantic freedom; it is based on some idea of ‘natural rights’, and it ends either with the restitution of the older established order, or in tragic exile and death. The Forest Outlaw is always privileged – and is allowed, even applauded for, activities that in the poor would be regarded as criminal. This too is embedded in language – a ‘villain’ is now a bad guy, a criminal, and particularly one with malevolent intent, but originally the word meant nothing more – or less – than someone at the bottom of the tidy feudal pack – a landless agricultural labourer, a ‘low born rustic’. The poor become the crooks, but the rich become adventurers.

  The high-handed and noble option of the Out Law was not easily available to the poor displaced by the development of Forest Law, although it certainly impacted on them bitterly. Their resistance took the form, as it so often does, of a dark humour, even impertinence, expressed in jokes and stories.

  Kings do badly in fairy stories.

  This probably feels odd, even wrong, at first reading. Everyone knows that fairy stories are about Princes and Princesses. But they aren’t. Jack Zipes has counted. In the Grimms’ collection, there are 29 stories (out of 256) in which one of the principal characters is either a prince or princess,11 though it is rare for both of the eventual partners to be royal. There is only one story in which a king is the protagonist. And these 30 royals are outnumbered by tailors (11), soldiers (10), servants (8), and 29 other skilled tradesmen or their children. There are 78 stories in which the protagonist is a farmer, a peasant or a ‘poor person’, or the child of one. Moreover, it is easy to forget that that the Grimms’ collection includes about a dozen stories – similar in theme and structure to the more expected fairy stories – which feature saints, most often Mary, not in biblical tales, but as hagiography. If you see Joseph as a skilled tradesman and Mary as the daughter of poor parents (although, like a fairy-tale heroine, eventually becoming the Queen of Heaven itself) – which is how they were perceived for much of the Middle Ages – then this makes another half dozen stories to add to this list.

  In a great many of the stories the young and the poor set about outwitting the kings. Young princes and princesses are often complicit in their father’s downfall or in subverting his plans. In story after story the King sends the lower-class hero off on impossible quests, hoping to get rid of him and keep his daughter for more profitable marriage; in story after story young women, both princesses and commoners, outwit the King to marry his son. Kings tend to be snobbish, cruel, incompetent and – in the end – outflanked.

  These are stories about ‘just deserts’, not about inherited privilege; cunning as well as industry and courage are to be admired. Proud princesses get their comeuppance and the poor get rich by trickery more often than by virtue. In no stories, however, even in the pietistic editorial hands of Jacob Grimm, does anyone find happiness by becoming reconciled to their poverty – happiness means being rich and powerful as well as beloved. These are radical, not conservative, tales; stories about overcoming distressing poverty and alienation, subverting the normal social order and achieving a new life of comfort and security.

  In fact, it is not just kings who come off badly in classic fairy stories – fathers do too. Fathers are closely linked to kings – as God is to the world (both Father and King), so a king is to his country and a father to his household. They have immense power and control. Following the lines from the Peterborough Chronicle I quoted above, the poet concludes:He loved the stags as much

  as if he were their father.

  There seems to be a strong element of satire here: a king is meant to be a father to his people, not to some deer, and his fatherhood is complicated because he is caring for the deer in order to kill them.

  Fathers tend not to get very sympathetic treatment in fairy stories in general – good mothers die and stepmothers are evilly intended, but fathers are simply useless. Unlike mothers, fathers do not die (there are very few fatherless children), they are merely negligent or absent: what on earth was Cinderella’s father doing while his new wife enslaved his own child? Or worse, in ‘Beauty and the Beast’, as in many similar tales, the father sacrifices his daughter to protect himself: the Beast will only spare his life if he promises to send his daughter along as a substitute, and even though he believes that the Beast is going to kill her, he agrees. The king-father in ‘The Seven Ravens’ weakly marries a witch he does not love and then fails to protect his children from her; he tries to hide the boys in the forest but completely mismanages this endeavour, mainly through his own stupidity.

  Above all fathers, like kings, even when they are not weak or selfish, lack wisdom and discernment. They fail to notice that the youngest of the three sons is actually the hero; or that the humblest of their daughter’s suitors is actually the bravest and the best. They favour the status quo at the expense of their own real interests.

  The winners in these stories are not the powerful and prosperous, but the poor – the apparently stupid, the apparently uncouth, the apparently idle. Feminist criticism has interpreted fairy stories as inherently sexist. Between the 1812 and the 1856 editions of the Grimms’ tales, the female characters do become more passive, but even the earliest versions of the stories advocate rather different moral strategies for men and women, so there is some real truth in this charge, but it has led us to overlook perhaps how profoundly anti-patriarchal they are. Kings and fathers are incompetent and often risible; they are defeated, outwitted and trapped into marriage or forced to give away half their kingdom (and presumably the other half when they die) and their lovely daughters to those whose claims rest not in their strength or power but in their cunning, their kindness and, very often, their simple good luck.

  Who are these soldiers and tailors who come up the long path through the forest and create havoc in the town or castle? In their specific forms they are social characters from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the tales were being recorded. Zipes argues that the high number of soldier heroes in the Grimms’ collection is ‘most likely a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars and the vast increase of soldiering as a profession in the European population’. 12 In the army of this period there was an enormous divide between officers and common soldiers, who were badly paid, ill treated and commonly despised; they were regularly punished by flogging for minor breaches of discipline and attempts to desert, and sometimes even less serious failures of obedience were met with capital punishment. Their lives were miserable, and if they were wounded or recalcitrant they were dismissed without any further support or even severance pay. In eight of the ten soldier tales the protagonists are explicit about their hatred for the army, for the king whom they ‘served’, and about their desire for revenge. Another tale is about three soldiers who have deserted, which comes to much the same thing. They are desperate, dangerous and determined. Having little or nothing to lose, no investment in living a peaceful social life and no obvious futur
e, they are fearless, cunning and inventive. They are also outsiders – in a broadly agricultural society, soldiers were displaced in the literal sense of the word: they are tramps and vagabonds, they have spent much of their life on the road, and they arrive at the scene of action by chance and travel.

  The tailors, too, are transient, rootless and dissatisfied. Although there were rich master tailors in the old cities of Germany, these are not the tailors of the fairy stories. By the time the Grimm brothers were collecting their tales, the old guild and apprentice system was breaking up. Too many tailors spent much of their life as journeymen, always looking for a better, more stable position, often forced into shoddy workmanship and cost-cutting exercises, and because they were travelling on they had little to gain by establishing reputations for high-quality work. In addition, tailoring was an attractive option for young men who were neither rich nor strong, because it needed very little capital investment to set up as a tailor and the job was not physically demanding in the way that most other skilled work was. Tailors had a reputation for being cunning, dishonest, quick witted and puny.

  What the two professions have in common is that they produce deeply disgruntled characters with little to gain from social norms, landless and displaced, driven by a sense of injustice, forced to travel and live by their wits, and all because of poverty itself. Tailors and ex-soldiers are the specific late-eighteenth-century version of something more universal – the dispossessed and angry poor. They do not look like hero material in any expected sense of the word to a literate society brought up on a more romantic heroism, but in fairy stories they (as part of a larger, looser group of itinerant workmen – amongst them a shoemaker, a musician, a journeyman, and a surgeon) easily outnumber the princes and the rich merchants. And they are triumphant.