Course:History 344 Nasty Families/Cultural Topics/Forests and Timber

Forests and Timber

In Elizabethan and Stuart England, prices for wood and charcoal grew faster than for any other major commodity. [BN: Cite] There was always a need for timber but it did not become a necessity until after the Great Fire of London when everything needed to be rebuilt. The Countess of Rutland apparently made a lot of money by obtaining Royal permission to take timber from Sherwood Forest to repair her castles and mills, then selling the timber on the black market. Demographic recovery at the beginning of the 16th century led to land hunger by the end of the century, which stimulated renewed interest in marginal lands. Therefore when people in the late 16th century and early 17th century spoke of a ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ they did not interpret it as a barren waste but rather a dense area of tree’s, bushes and wildlife. Men were not suppose to live in these areas for it was meant to be the home of animals not humans, and therefore people who dwelled in forest areas were commonly looked at as out-laws, poor and uncivilized creatures. The fluctuations between agricultural prices and the prices of timber provide other examples of the superiority of agricultural land over timber in the landowner’s minds. Examples are numerous of periods of plantations of trees at times of low agricultural prices. From 1690 to 1800 the price of timber rose while wool and corn fell in price by the end of the 17th century. During the Napoleonic wars the price of timber rose again and the lands were reclaimed and trees were cut down. This alteration between agriculture and forestry was rather shamelessly summed up by a Restoration peer who reputedly said that wood was ‘an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts.’ There was no "environmental" movement in the 1600s: the stretches of English forests that remained were preserved because they were valuable as strategic reserves, especially for the Navy. The final savage forest-clearing came while England was ruled by the fanatically Protestant revolutionary government of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s, between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of Charles II. Parliament passed "An Act for the Disafforestation, Sale, and Improvement of Royal Forests" in 1653, with Sherwood Forest one of the priorities for sale, along with Ashdown Forest in the Weald. Royal forests were decimated in a few years.