The Forest

by Edward Rutherfurd

  All through the morning the business went on. A fellow had stolen wood from the Forest. Another had made an illegal assart of land. One of the vills had failed to report a dead buck within its boundaries. Life in the Forest did not change much. But had a forester from Rufus’s time been brought there, he would have observed one difference. For whereas the Norman forest law had been designed, with its mutilations and killings, to punish and frighten the people, the accommodation between the monarch and his Forest folk had long ago been reached, even in the most formal court. There was no mutilation. Only the most habitual felons were hung. The penalty for almost all offences was a fine. The guilty party was ‘in mercy’ or ‘amerced’ a sum. And even this varied according to the wealth of the offender. A poor man amerced sixpence at the last court, who had been unable to pay, was let off. Many of the fines for encroachments on crown land were repeated so automatically in the records of court after court that they were, in effect, rents paid for illegal tenancy. Pledges were taken from the better-off that their neighbours would pay their fines, or behave themselves in future. The law in the Forest, as elsewhere in Plantagenet England, was a common-sense and communal affair.

  Finally, some time after noon, they came to the Beaulieu business.

  It is presented that on the Friday before the Feast of St Matthew last, Roger Martell, Henry de Damerham and others did enter the Forest with bows and arrows, dogs and greyhounds, to harm the venison …

  The charge, which would be inserted in the court record in Latin, was read out by the clerk. It gave exact details of what the poachers did and was not contested. All threw themselves on the mercy of the court. The justice looked at them severely while the forest folk in the hall listened carefully.

  ‘This is a venison offence, carried out in open contempt of the law, by those who, by reason of their position, should know better. It will not be tolerated. You are amerced as follows: ‘Will atte Wood, half a mark.’ Poor Will. A stiff fine. Two of his cousins stood surety and he was given a year to pay it. The other local men in the party all got the same.

  Next came the turn of the young gentlemen: five pounds each – fifteen times the amount of the Forest men. This was only just. Finally, the justice came to Martell.

  ‘Roger Martell. You were, without question, the leader of these malefactors. You led them to the grange. You took deer. You are also a young man of substance.’ He paused. ‘The king himself was not amused to hear about this matter. You are amerced the sum of one hundred pounds.’

  A collective gasp. The two sheriffs looked shattered. It was a stupendous fine, even for a rich landowner; and it was also very clear that King Edward himself had approved it beforehand. Royal disfavour. Martell went white as a sheet. He would either be selling land or losing his income for many a year. Manly though he was, he visibly shook.

  The court had only just started to buzz, however, when the justice said sharply to the clerk: ‘Now then, what about this lay brother?’

  And again, the courtroom grew quiet. Luke was one of the Prides. There was a lot of interest. Near the back of the court Mary strained to hear every word.

  The case against Luke was less clear.

  ‘First,’ the clerk announced, ‘that he gave shelter to the malefactors at the grange. Second, that he was in league with them. Third that he attacked an abbey monk, Brother Matthew, who sought to prevent the poachers from entering the grange.’

  ‘Is the abbey represented?’ the justice demanded.

  John of Grockleton raised his claw, and a moment later Brother Matthew and three of the lay brothers stood with him before the justice.

  The justice, naturally, was well acquainted with the facts from the steward, but there were aspects of the business he did not like.

  ‘You refuse to take responsibility for this lay brother?’

  ‘We disown him utterly,’ said the prior.

  ‘The charge says he was in league with these poachers. Presumably because he let them into the grange?’

  ‘What other explanation is possible?’ said Grockleton.

  ‘I should think he might have been frightened of them.’

  ‘They offered no violence,’ remarked the clerk.

  ‘That’s true. Now what about this attack?’ He turned to Brother Matthew.

  ‘Well.’ Brother Matthew’s kindly face was a little embarrassed. ‘When Martell refused to take his wounded companion away, I’m afraid I attacked him with a staff. Brother Luke grabbed a spade and swung it, and broke the staff. Then the spade hit me on the head.’

  ‘I see. Was this lay brother your enemy?’

  ‘Oh no. Quite the reverse.’

  Grockleton’s claw shot up. ‘Which proves that he must have been in league with Martell.’

  ‘Or was trying to prevent this monk from starting a fight.’

  ‘I must confess,’ Brother Matthew said mildly, ‘I did wonder that myself, afterwards.’

  ‘Brother Matthew is too kind, Justice,’ the prior cut in. ‘His judgement is too forgiving.’

  It was at this point that the justice decided he really did not like Grockleton. ‘So he ran?’ he continued.

  ‘He ran,’ chimed Grockleton definitively.

  ‘Why the devil isn’t the abbot trying him over his assault of this monk?’

  ‘He is expelled from the order. We are here to prosecute him,’ said Grockleton.

  ‘He’s not here, I suppose?’ Heads were shaken. ‘Very well, then.’ He eyed the prior with distaste. ‘Since he belonged to the abbey at the time of this crime, if such it was, and was within the Great Close, you do realize that you are responsible for producing him, don’t you?’

  ‘I?’

  ‘You. The abbey. Of course. For his non-appearance, therefore, the abbey is amerced. Two pounds.’

  The prior went bright red. All round the court there were smiles.

  ‘I’m sorry he isn’t here to defend himself,’ the justice went on, ‘but there it is. The law takes its course. As the offence seems to be a felony and he’s not here, I have no option. Let him be exacted and, if he doesn’t appear at the next court, outlawed.’

  From her position at the back, Mary listened with a heavy heart. Exacted: that just meant he must be produced. And outlawed? Technically it signified he was outside the law. You couldn’t be harboured by anyone; you could even be killed with impunity. You had no rights. A powerful sanction.

  If only Luke had turned up. Brother Adam, the clever monk, had been right. Luke had underestimated the good sense of the court. It was obvious that the justice was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But what could she do? Luke had gone and no one even knew where he was. She could have wept.

  ‘That’s it, I think.’ The justice was looking at the clerk. People were preparing to move. ‘Is there any other business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mary started. Tom had left her at the beginning of the proceedings to stand with some of the other men and she had not been able to see him over the crowd of heads. Yet this was his voice and she could see him now, elbowing his way to the front. Whatever was he doing? At the same time, over on her left, she was conscious of a small movement by the door.

  Now Tom was standing, squared off, in front of the justice, with his tousled hair and leather jerkin, as if he was ready to fight him.

  ‘We’ve had no notice. This hasn’t been forwarded from the Court of Attachments,’ said the clerk crossly.

  ‘Well, as we’re here, we may as well hear it,’ the justice replied. He fixed Tom sternly with his eye. ‘What’s your business?’

  ‘Theft, my lord,’ Tom bellowed in a voice that shook the rafters. ‘Damnable theft.’

  The hall fell silent. The clerk, having almost jumped off his bench at the shout, took up his quill.

  The justice, a little taken aback, gazed at Tom curiously. ‘Theft? Of what?’

  ‘My pony!’ Tom shouted again, as if to call the heavens themselves to witness.

  It took a sec
ond or two for the titters around the court to begin. The justice frowned. ‘Your pony. Stolen from where?’

  ‘The Forest,’ Tom cried.

  Chuckles were breaking out now. Even the foresters were starting to grin. The justice glanced across at the steward, who shook his head and smiled.

  The justice liked the Forest. He enjoyed its peasants and secretly relished their modest crimes. After the business of Martell, which had truly annoyed him, he had no objection to ending the day with a little light relief. ‘You mean your pony was depastured on the Forest? Was it marked?’

  ‘No. It was born there.’

  ‘A foal, you mean? How do you know it was yours?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And where is it now?’

  ‘In John Pride’s cowshed,’ Tom cried in rage and despair. ‘That’s where.’

  It was too much. The whole courtroom began to laugh. Even his Furzey kinsmen couldn’t help seeing the joke. Mary had to look down at the floor. The justice turned to the agisters for illumination and Alban, in whose bailiwick this lay, stepped over and whispered in his ear, while Tom scowled.

  ‘And where is John Pride?’ the justice demanded.

  ‘He’s here,’ Tom shouted, swinging round and pointing triumphantly to the back of the crowd.

  Everybody turned. The justice stared. There was a brief silence.

  And then, from beside the door, came a deep voice: ‘He’s gone.’

  It was no good. The hall dissolved. The Forest people howled. They wept with laughter. The foresters, the solemn verderers, even the gentlemen of the jury couldn’t help themselves. The justice, watching, shook his head and bit his lip.

  ‘You may laugh,’ Tom yelled. And they did. But he wasn’t done. Looking right and left, red-faced, he turned back to the justice and, pointing at Alban, he shouted: ‘It’s him, and the likes of him, that lets Pride get away with it. And you know why? Because he pays them!’

  The justice’s face changed. Several of the foresters stopped laughing. At the back, Mary groaned.

  ‘Silence!’ the justice roared and the laughter in the hall began to die. ‘You are not’ – he glared at Furzey – ‘to be impertinent.’

  The trouble was, there was some truth in it. Young Alban probably was innocent, as yet. But there was inevitably a certain traffic between the Forest people and those in authority in the bailiwicks. A nice pie, a cheese, a fence mended without charge – it might be hard after such kindnesses for the steward not to overlook some minor infraction of the law. Everyone knew it. The king himself had once remarked to the justice, not wholly in jest, that one day he would have to set up a commission to investigate the whole Forest administration. If Furzey wanted to be a troublemaker this was neither the time nor the place to be watched.

  ‘You are to go through the proper channels,’ the justice told him curtly. ‘Your case will only be heard here after it comes through the Court of Attachments. Clerk,’ he ordered, ‘enter that in the record. The court’, he announced, ‘is closed.’

  So while Tom stood there in his impotent rage and the crowd, chuckling again, started to make for the door, the clerk dipped his quill in the ink and wrote in the parchment the record that would be preserved, as the true voice of the Forest, down the long centuries:

  Thomas Furzey complains of John Pride theft of a pony. John Pride did not come. Therefore to next court, etc.

  Luke loved to walk through the Forest. He would stride for miles. When he was a child he had learned to move fast to keep up with John and Mary; so that now, anyone who tried to walk beside him would be astonished at his speed.

  People thought him dreamy, yet his eyes were always sharper than theirs. There wasn’t a stream in the whole Forest he didn’t know. The most ancient oaks, every great ivy-covered hulk, were like his personal friends.

  His appearance had altered since leaving the abbey. Dressed in a woodman’s smock and jerkin, with woollen leggings and a thick leather belt, his hair and beard now grown long and shaggy, he looked exactly like a score of other such fellows and no one seeing him trudging along a forest path would have given him a second thought.

  But he was on the run – about to be outlawed. What did that mean? In theory, that every man’s hand was against you. And in practice? It depended on whether you had friends and whether the authorities really wanted to find you.

  As things stood at present, if one of the foresters met him face to face and recognized him, they’d take him into custody. No question. But if young Alban, say, caught sight of a shaggy figure in the distance that just might be Luke, would he ride up to challenge him? Possibly. But he was far more likely to turn his horse’s head and ride another way.

  What should he do, though? He couldn’t go on like this for ever. The court at Lyndhurst had made its feelings pretty clear. He might do well to turn himself in and hope for mercy.

  The trouble was – perhaps it was in his blood – Luke had an instinctive distrust of authority.

  That might seem strange for a man who had chosen to live under the monastic rule of Beaulieu. Yet in reality it was not. For Luke, the abbey was a sanctuary in the middle of a huge estate where he enjoyed working and which gave him the freedom of the Forest. He liked the services in the abbey church. He would listen, enraptured, to the singing. His natural curiosity had led him to learn many of the Latin psalms and their meaning even if he could not read. But he wouldn’t have wished to go to services all the time like the choir monks. He wanted to get back out in the fields, or to help the shepherds as they went from grange to grange. The abbey fed him and clothed him, and left him free of responsibilities, without a care in the world. What more could you ask?

  Above all, in his mind the abbey worked because it was tied to the natural order. Nature was what he understood. The trees, the plants, the forest creatures: they had their own rhythm. You could never know it all, but it worked; and the abbey estate made sense only because it had made itself part of the process.

  So if outsiders, men like Grockleton or the king’s justices who didn’t really understand the Forest, came along and tried to impose a lot of stupid rules, if they claimed to be authority, the only thing to do was to avoid them. In his heart, the only laws he respected were the laws of nature.

  ‘The rest don’t amount to anything, really,’ he would say. And the authorities who set such store by these laws were certainly not to be trusted. ‘They may speak you fair one day, but they’ll get you the next. The only thing they truly care about is their power.’

  It was a simple peasant’s view of authority and entirely accurate.

  So he didn’t intend to trust the justice and his court, especially with Grockleton still around. The best thing to do, he reckoned, was to stay out of sight and wait for something to turn up. You never knew what might.

  He had friends. He’d be all right until the next winter. In the meantime he had found plenty to keep him busy. Every few days, although she had no idea of it, he had gone to keep an eye on his sister Mary. He liked to observe her going about her tasks by the cottage, or running after the children as they played outside, even if he never spoke to her. It was as if he were a guardian angel, secretly watching over her. ‘I’m closer than you think, girl,’ he would mutter with satisfaction. He found this exercise in invisibility so pleasing that he took to watching his brother John as well. The pony was allowed to run in the field now, but there was always one of John’s children guarding it.

  And then, of course, he would walk the Forest.

  His route that day had taken him from near Burley over to the north of Lyndhurst. The woods were quiet. Huge oaks spread all around. Here and there, a small clearing appeared where some ancient tree, brought down by a storm, lay across the forest floor, leaving a patch of open sky in the canopy above. As he walked, he would pause occasionally to inspect some lichen-covered trunk, or turn over a fallen branch to see what creatures were dwelling under it. And he had just passed above the village of Minstead and come to a
section of the Forest that bordered a high open heath, when he paused and looked down at something with interest.

  It was such a tiny object: just an acorn from last year’s fall, which had escaped the hungry pigs and, nestling in the damp brown leaf mould, had cracked open and struck roots into the ground.

  Luke smiled. He liked to see things grow. The tiny white roots looked so vulnerable. A little green shoot was emerging. How astonishing to think that this was the beginning of a mighty oak. Then he gently shook his head. ‘You’ll never make it there,’ he said.

  How many of the acorns that fall ever become oak trees? Who knows? One in a hundred thousand? Surely not. Less than one in a hundred times that number, perhaps. This is the vast strength, the massive, numberless oversupply of nature in the forest silence. The chances of an acorn living were almost infinitesimally small. The pigs turned out for the autumn mast, or any of the other forest animals might eat them. Ponies or cattle might crush them underfoot. If an acorn survived that first season and happened to be on ground where it could strike root, it could only grow into a tree if there was a break in the canopy above to give it light. But even for those few that grew to be saplings, there was still an ever present danger.

  It is not only man who destroys. Other animals, too, left to themselves, will destroy grasslands, woods, whole habitats with a stupidity as great as, perhaps even greater than, that shown by humans. The deer loved to eat oak shoots. The only way for one to survive was to have a protector. Nature provided several. Holly, although the deer ate holly, might screen an oak. Butcher’s-broom, the little evergreen shrub with the razor-sharp spikes – the deer avoided that. For some reason they seldom cared to eat bracken either.

  Very carefully, scooping out the soil around the seedling with his hands, Luke carried it in a cradle of earth, without disturbing its tiny life. A few yards away there was a small ring of holly surrounded by butcher’s-broom. Entering this, ignoring the scratches on his arms, he planted the seedling in the patch of earth in the centre. He glanced up. There was clear blue sky above. ‘Grow there,’ he said happily, and went on his way.