The Forest (97 page)

‘And why, Colonel, in your view, has there grown up such opposition to the Crown?’

Opposition? Of course there had been opposition: fences broken, young plantations set on fire. These were the ways the poorer Forest folk let you know their feelings and frankly he didn’t blame them. Cumberbatch might like to characterize this as a rebellion against the monarch, but he wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

‘There has been opposition to the Office of Woods,’ he said calmly, ‘but the New Forest Commoners like myself are loyal Englishmen and have always enjoyed the special protection of the Crown. Until recently,’ he added.

‘Colonel, would you care to summarize what, in your view, have been the causes of the bad feeling in the Forest since the Deer Removal Act?’

‘Certainly.’ He might have been only a bluff soldier and country squire, he might have missed the Oxford education that his father Wyndham had enjoyed, but the statement of Colonel Godwin Albion to the Committee of the House of Lords would have made his father proud. It was concise, accurate and elegant. ‘My statement falls into two parts,’ he explained. ‘The first is political, the second material.’

It was a melancholy tale.

Why, the Colonel used to wonder, had they chosen Cumberbatch? He was far too young, only in his early twenties when he first arrived. He looked and behaved like a pugilist in the ring. He knew nothing about the Forest and cared even less. And straight away he had attacked the Forest folk with a vengeance.

His first assault had been absurd. In the days when the Forest was an actively managed deer preserve, the commoners were supposed to keep their stock off the Forest during the fence month, when the deer gave birth, and throughout the winter heyning, as the cold months were called, when food was scarce. Not that these rules had been enforced for decades. It was generally assumed that the fees the commoners paid entitled them to year-round grazing. And with the deer gone there was no possible reason to apply these medieval rules anyway. Yet no sooner had he arrived than Cumberbatch had tried to order all the stock off the Forest during these times. It was a senseless harassment which, if followed up, would have ruined most of the commoners.

Yet that had only been the beginning. Next, a new register of commoners’ rights had been compiled – essentially an update of the old register of 1670 – but with one great difference. Almost every right of common claimed, from the big claims like those of the Albion estate down to those of the smallest freeholder, was now disputed by the Crown.

‘Your Lordships, this could only lead any reasonable person to conclude that the intention was to destroy the commoners. The legal costs alone have been crippling. Yet even this is overshadowed by one other business.’

Despite the fact that the Deer Removal Act had made sweeping changes, many people still expected more drastic change to come. The reasoning was simple: if the Office of Woods and the commoners couldn’t agree about how to share the Forest, then why not partition the whole place once and for all? The commoners could have their land, the Office of Woods their inclosures, and they need never trouble each other again – the big problem being to ensure that one side did not get all the best land at the expense of the other.

‘I refer, of course,’ Albion went on, ‘to Mr Cumberbatch’s famous letter.’

Famous. Infamous. It was perhaps unfair that this document – a private letter to his superiors pointing out the most advantageous position for them to take – should have been made public. But in 1854 it had been published in a report on the Forest and everyone had read it. The point that the young Deputy Surveyor made was clever and brutal. Since there was a good chance the Forest would end by being partitioned, he argued, the Office of Woods should make all its inclosures as fast as possible, on the best land. With that land, for all practical purposes, withdrawn from the equation, the commoners’ future share was bound to be worth far less.

‘Nothing in the last twenty years has caused such bad feeling,’ Albion pointed out. ‘The commoners have been told, without a doubt, that it is the intention of the Crown to destroy them. That, Your Lordships, is the politics of the Forest now.’

Did they care? It was hard to know.

‘I come now to the material threat.’ He looked at them severely. ‘Your Lordships must understand the underlying problem. Trees grow best on the richest land and that’s where the best grazing is, too. So the tree-growers and the commoning farmers both want the same pieces of the Forest. Secondly, it is often supposed that once you inclose land for trees and let them grow to a certain height you can open the inclosure for grazing again. That’s not true. With today’s planting methods the trees are grown so close together that little ground cover grows underneath them. The new inclosures are lost to grazing for generations. Inevitably, therefore, the tree-grower seeks to deprive the farmer of his best land, for an indefinite period.’

‘You say “seek to deprive”, Colonel. Doesn’t that presume the Office of Woods to be aggressive in its claims?’

‘It is not presumption. I have absolute material proof that it is highly aggressive. That is my point. First, they have frequently said they will enclose their allotted acres, reopen the inclosures later – which I have just explained won’t work – and then enclose the same amount all over again. I don’t think the Act allows this, but if so, they will plainly end by taking most of the Forest.

‘More immediately, however, they have done something rather clever. They have said that there were still authorities to make inclosures, deriving from the ancient legislation of 1698, which had never been exercised. So they added those to the ten thousand acres allowed under the Act and came up with several thousand more.’ He gave their lordships a wry look.

‘Your lordships, it may be legal. But let me show you the deviousness of the thing. You will recall that under the Deer Removal Act it was agreed that no inclosure should be less than three hundred acres. That was precisely to stop the Office of Woods picking off little pieces of the best land all over the Forest. But by saying they were taking up their unused quota from the earlier legislation, they neatly evaded Parliament’s intention. Here is a list of the inclosures. I invite you to look at them.’

He had done his work thoroughly. The list showed exactly what he said: a few score acres here, a hundred there, two hundred somewhere else – all on the best land.

‘Nor is that all,’ the Colonel went on. ‘We now come to the inclosures made under the Act. About four of the ten thousand acres have been taken up so far. Each individual inclosure must be a minimum of three hundred acres, you will remember. Did they obey the Act? Of course they did. And let me show you how. I have made some maps. It’s something we old soldiers learn to do,’ he added drily. ‘Perhaps you would kindly consider them?’

As they looked at his maps even some of their lordships could not repress a smile. The new inclosures might be three hundred acres, but the shapes were fantastic. Here a long arm along a line of rich pasture; there a great curve to avoid a patch of poor soil. One of the inclosures was shaped like a huge ‘C’.

‘Your Lordships,’ the good Colonel said pleasantly, ‘we have all been taken for fools.’

Year after year it had gone on. Cumberbatch and his men, under legal sanction, stealing the best of the common land, quietly but steadily. There had been nothing anyone could do. Until two years before.

The meeting which had precipitated the crisis took place when the Commissioners, who had not met for some years, were suddenly called and told, without any consultation or warning, to approve inclosures taking up all the rest of the land allowed under the Act. Six thousand acres: the biggest land grab ever attempted. When they expressed their shock, Cumberbatch said he would have them thrown off the Commission.

The time had come to fight. Within weeks the larger Forest landowners had met and formed a league – the New Forest Association. The Colonel had joined it, of course. So had one of the verderers, a Mr Eyre, whose family had extensive land in the northern Forest. Other families like the Drummonds, the Comptons of Minstead, and the lords of the old Bisterne estate were all ready to defend their heritage. Lord Henry, with the biggest estate of all, was a key member. There was also one most welcome addition to their number: a certain Mr Esdaile who had bought an estate at the dark old village of Burley some eighteen years before – a newcomer in Forest terms, therefore – but whose legal training made him invaluable. They had prepared a petition. The Office of Woods had been forced to pause. And now here they were, in the august setting of the House of Lords itself, fighting for the Forest.

‘Colonel Albion.’ Another peer, younger than the rest, addressed him now. ‘May I ask you whether your fellow Commissioners, other than the three from the Office of Woods, are equally opposed to these inclosures?’

Albion stared at him gravely. He knew what this meant. Grockleton. Damn the man. Why the magistrate from Southampton should have decided to involve himself in Forest affairs he had never been sure, but some years ago he had purchased a hundred acres with commoning rights, and then got himself put on the Commission. He and the Deputy Surveyor seemed to agree about everything. As far as anyone could discover, Grockleton wanted to see the entire Forest as a huge commercial plantation without any humans in it at all.

‘I could not say,’ the Colonel answered calmly. ‘Most, I believe, do; but it is not my place to speak for them.’

‘I see. You make these complaints on behalf of the commoners in general, do you not? Of whom there are, in round terms, about a thousand?’

‘Commoning rights vary. I believe that there are well over a thousand households with rights of one kind or another.’

‘Yet,’ the young peer had a little glint of triumph in his eye now, ‘isn’t it the members of the New Forest Association, the main landowners like yourself, who have most to lose or gain in this?’

That was it: the Colonel saw it clear as day. Cumberbatch and Grockleton had got at this young peer. For this was always the line taken by the Office of Woods: if you opposed them, you must be doing it out of self-interest. He smiled sweetly.

‘Quite the reverse, in fact.’ He saw the young peer frown. ‘You see,’ he went on blandly, ‘while it is true that I can rent out an acre with commoning rights for far more than one without those rights, this business isn’t going to ruin me. And if one day the Forest is broken up and partitioned –
disafforested
is the technical term, as you may know – we big landowners will probably receive fair compensation. But the little people, without the huge open Forest, will be ruined. And, speaking for myself, I don’t want to see such a thing happen.’ He paused. ‘Of course,’ he added, as though the thought had just struck him, ‘there may be landowners who feel otherwise. My fellow commissioner Mr Grockleton, for instance, has land and some tenants. Whether he cares about their fate I couldn’t say.’ That thrust went home. But the young peer wasn’t quite done yet.

‘The smallholders and tenants in the Forest, Colonel, are not a very settled population are they? I mean to say, you could hardly call them solid farmers or yeomen, could you?’

He might have guessed that was coming. Sooner or later, whenever you talked to outsiders, it always did. The landed classes have always had clear views about peasants. Good peasants lived on open lands and touched their forelock to you. Once you got into hilly country, watch out. And as for the dark forest, outlaws lived there; poachers; charcoal burners and tinkers. Who knew what sort of people these New Forest commoners descended from? Should the legitimate interests of the Crown really be held up for a population of shiftless vagabonds?

And now Albion smiled. ‘I suggest that Your Lordship judge for yourself,’ he replied amiably. ‘For the next person you are to interview is one of them. My tenant, Mr Pride.’

Outwardly the Colonel smiled; inwardly he said a prayer. Now he’d find out if he’d been right to take the risk. Just so long as he didn’t become abusive and weaken their case. God knows he’d spoken to him about it frankly enough, and Pride had promised to be circumspect.

The other problem was young George, Pride’s son.

Personally, Albion didn’t blame George Pride for taking a job with the Office of Woods. Others had done the same. A job was a job. George had a young family to think of. But Pride senior had felt otherwise. There had been a furious row. He’d vowed never to forgive him; and since George had started working for Cumberbatch, his father had not spoken to him. Family loyalty was close in the Forest and this rupture was a sad and serious matter.

Whether Cumberbatch understood all this was another issue. As far as the Deputy Surveyor was concerned, the father of one of his employees was coming to testify against him, and he wouldn’t be best pleased. He couldn’t actually dismiss George because of it, but the young man would be under suspicion. Albion was sorry about that but if necessary, he had decided, he must sacrifice George Pride to the greater good. If Pride senior kept his head he was a powerful witness.

Would he?

They looked at Pride with interest as he stood, and was then gently induced to sit down before them. He sat bolt upright. Even the young peer couldn’t help noticing that Mr Pride looked very respectable. The Chairman addressed him kindly. ‘Whereabouts do you live?’

‘At Oakley.’

‘How long have you lived there?’

‘Always.’

‘Always?’ The Chairman smiled. ‘You cannot always have been there, Mr Pride, but I take it you mean all your life?’

‘I meant my family was always there, Your Lordship. I mean,’ he frowned, ‘not always, but before King William.’

‘You mean King William IV, before our present queen, or King William III, perhaps?’

‘No, Sir. I meant King William the Conqueror, that made the Forest.’

The Chairman looked somewhat astonished, glanced at Colonel Albion, who smiled and nodded.

‘You have a smallholding of how many acres?’

‘It was eight. Now I have twelve. The eight rented are off the Colonel, the four I bought freehold.’