An American chatter this morning asked if all firewood in the UK was still the property of the king. “Oh dear” I thought, especially when someone else replied “oh I never knew that”… Time for a quick history lesson for our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic.
When people hear the phrase “royal forest”, they picture dense woodland, deer leaping majestically, and a king claiming ownership of every tree and twig. The reality was both more bureaucratic and more controversial: a royal forest was not defined by trees. It was defined by law.
After the Norman Conquest of 1066, William I introduced a legal system known as forest law. Its purpose was simple: to protect the king’s hunting rights. Any land placed under forest law became a royal forest, whether it was woodland, farmland, heath, villages, or rivers. The presence of trees was optional. The presence of royal authority was not. By the late 11th and 12th centuries, vast areas of England were designated as royal forest. At its height, roughly a quarter of the country was subject to forest law. This was not popular.
Forest law sat outside common law. It imposed harsh penalties for killing deer, taking timber, clearing land, or even owning hunting dogs with intact claws. Ordinary people could live inside a royal forest, but their daily lives were restricted. Farming, building, and gathering wood were all tightly controlled – crazy right!
That said, the king did not own everything within the forests. Many people held long established rights known as rights of common. These included grazing animals, collecting firewood for personal use, and gathering materials for repairs. These rights mattered because they were how people survived. When they were ignored or restricted, resentment followed quickly.
The expansion of royal forests reached its peak under Henry II and his sons. By then, opposition was widespread among nobles, landowners, and villagers alike. Forest law was seen as arbitrary, punitive, and designed to benefit the Crown at everyone else’s expense. Pressure finally boiled over in the early 13th century. In 1215, King John was forced to accept Magna Carta. Two years later, a separate document went further. The Charter of the Forest.
The Charter of the Forest was, in practical terms, a rollback. It removed large areas from forest law, restored common rights, reduced punishments, and placed limits on royal power. Land that had been absorbed into royal forests in living memory was returned to ordinary legal status. Disafforestation became the order of the day.
Over the following centuries, royal forests continued to shrink. Some were broken up for agriculture. Others were sold, enclosed, or absorbed into private estates. A few survived because they served useful purposes, such as timber supply or military needs.
By the early modern period, forest law had largely faded into irrelevance. What remained were names, boundaries, and traditions rather than a functioning legal system. Today, there are no royal forests in the medieval sense. Places like the New Forest and the Forest of Dean still exist, but they are managed under modern law, with conservation, public access, and local rights written into statute. The king does not control hunting, wood gathering, or land use by decree. Parliament does.
Royal forests began as a tool of power. They ended as a lesson in limits.
England’s landscape still carries their names, but their story is really about how law, pressure, and persistence gradually pushed absolute authority back into something recognisably public.
