From the Forest (24 page)

The first is a more general observation – in fairy stories,
anyone
who has legitimate work in the forest will always turn out to be a ‘good’ character. The forests of these stories are full of baddies – witches and robbers and cruel, cunning enemies of various kinds, but they are always people who have invaded the forest, who do not truly belong there. Those whose livelihood is based within the woods however are always helpful, kind and useful to the hero or heroine. The woodcutter rescues Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf; the seven dwarves take tender care of Snow White; in ‘The Twelve Huntsmen’ (the only Grimms’ story I can think of in which women use cross-dressing as a disguise), the merry band of hunters liberates the King from false love. These forest workers are not usually the principal characters in these stories, they are helpful and supportive secondary characters who enable the hero or heroine to gain their wealth and happiness, and in particular they protect the vulnerable. To me, this minor but consistent detail is one of the things that confirms my speculative belief that these stories originated in the forest (rather than in the villages or castles around the forest). People who work in villages – innkeepers, millers, arable farmers, tailors, journeymen, castle servants – may be good or bad; but you can always trust those who work in the woods. It is not unreasonable to speculate that the tellers of these stories and the audience they told them to were people who worked in the woods. The Free Miners of the Forest of Dean are perhaps the last remaining group of people who work in forests without being ‘foresters’ of any kind. To be a Free Miner, as we will see, you have to be born in the Forest itself, and most of them live in it still.

The second link to fairy stories is more directly related to mining itself. In a surprising number of stories the protagonists find their fortune by going underground. They do this by going down a steep, narrow hole that appears to be built, as opposed to falling down a chasm or a rabbit hole like Alice. In ‘The Three Feathers’, for example, the father sets his three sons a series of tasks to determine who will inherit. To eliminate any quarrelling, he blows three feathers into the air and each son has to follow one. The two older boys go off after their feathers ‘to the East and to the West’, laughing at their youngest brother because his feather just falls to the ground. But he notices that where his feather landed there is a trap door, which he opens. He finds a staircase; at the bottom of the staircase he encounters a magical toad who supplies him with everything he needs to win the competition.
¹
Similarly in ‘The Worn out Dancing Shoes’, the soldier follows the princesses through a hidden trap door and down a steep flight of steps into a country where the trees are made of silver, gold and jewels. In ‘Mother Holle’ the heroine goes down a well to find her fortune and comes home again covered in gold, whereas the idle stepsister, trying the same scheme, returns coated in pitch. These are very clearly not caves like Aladdin’s, nor the underwater worlds of the Celtic stories; they are artefacts, very like mine shafts, at the bottom of which treasure is hidden.

Psychoanalytical readings of fairy stories interpret these descents as either the facing up to one’s own inner life or as symbolic renderings of sexuality. In as much as other worlds hidden in the dark underneath the sunlit ordinary one are almost universal in folklore and mythology, there is surely something in this. In many cultures these underworlds were the abode of the dead (all mythologies that have any concept of damnation locate hell under the earth, while heaven is above the bright sky). Visits to these worlds were dangerous, nearly always entailed long journeys into desolate places, and were undertaken at high risk and for important causes;
²
but they could also be richly rewarding, a task for designated heroes. But I was interested in the fairy stories’ more modest little underworlds, with neatly shored-up entrances usually adjacent to domestic dwellings, and usually stumbled upon by accident. In fairy stories these underworlds are usually kindly disposed towards the good characters. Across northern Europe coal has been mined on a small domestic scale within forests since at least 200 CE,
³
and as the stories were being recorded, it was proving to be the underpinning of the Industrial Revolution and new dreams of prosperity. The specificity of small shafts as opposed to natural caves or underwater caverns feels forest-born to me.

So I was very keen to understand more about the Free Miners. Their continuing presence here is closely related to the larger history of the Forest of Dean, which is somewhat different from the history of most Royal Forests.

The Forest of Dean forms a southward-pointing wedge of woodland between the Severn and the Tintern valleys. The whole forest is in fact in England rather than Wales, but until the Severn Bridge was built in 1966,
⁴
the lowest crossing over the Severn was at Gloucester, so the forest was oddly tucked away – part of neither Wales nor the West Country, somehow separate and independent, with a strong sense of identity and its own traditions. Although the Forest of Dean was stripped of its commons and wastes in the nineteenth century, it still has a social atmosphere which reminds one of older forest culture, self-contained, secret almost, and busy with the memories of industry (although in fact its inhabitants are now predominantly employed outside the forest). The villages here are not called Lover or Blissford as they are in the New Forest, but Cinderford and Coleford.

The Forest of Dean was one of William of Normandy’s initial tranches of Royal Forest, but even in the eleventh century it was rather different from the other Royal Forests. It was not afforested primarily for hunting – although the Forest Law applied. William may well have moved fast to assert his rights over the area in order to demonstrate his authority to the Welsh princes, who were restive and far from fully subdued; in fact, among other acts of ‘insubordination’, they took to claiming Royal Forests on their own behalf as a way of proving themselves the equals of any uppity new French king with fancy notions. But the real asset that the Forest of Dean offered the Crown was its famously massive oak trees. Wherever particularly large timbers were needed, the Forest of Dean supplied them. They went, for example, both to York for the cathedral roof and to London to build the Tower: these trees were worth the effort of transporting them across the whole country. The Crown could and did sell this remarkable timber, or give it as gifts, just as it did with the deer and game from other Royal Forests.

This is not obvious now; if you go to the Forest of Dean the oaks do not seem any more impressive than they are in other woods – they do not seem it because they are not in fact either any larger or more ancient than oak trees elsewhere. This is partly because more of the oaks were grown as ‘maidens’ for their large trunks here than elsewhere, so individual oaks have not lived as long as coppiced or pollarded trees in other oak woods. But the absence of the vast trees that attracted William and made the Forest of Dean famous is also due to a ghastly, though all too common, error of ‘management’ in the wood in the nineteenth century.

During the Napoleonic Wars a serious concern arose that not enough timber oaks were being grown to supply the military, which foresaw a future war requiring massive ship-building and refitting (and also large quantities of leather for artillery harnesses and infantry boots – oak bark was an essential ingredient in pre-industrial leather tanning). Napoleon’s blockade of the Channel showed just how vulnerable an island which was not self-sufficient could be, not only to invasion, but also to siege. The Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 proved that maintaining a strong navy was crucial to economic survival as well as to national security; a shortage of oak (essential for ship building – hence the Royal Navy’s anthem, ‘Hearts of Oak’) was a serious threat. In response, in 1809 about four-fifths of the Forest of Dean was authorised for enclosure; swathes of the forest were walled, banked in, drained and planted, mainly with new oaks. This involved clearing existing forest and also planting over large areas of ancient heath, wood pasture, greens and commons. And indeed, since it takes about 125 years to bring oaks to full maturity, trees planted in response to this anxiety would have been precisely ready for harvesting in the defence of Britain in 1939 – only by then they were not needed. Ironically, this massive planting exercise was finally completed in 1855, the year the Royal Navy built its last wooden ship. This is a common problem for forestry – it is extremely hard to predict at the point of planting what sort of wood will be most wanted by the time it is ready to cut – even coniferous plantations take over half a century to mature.

This misplaced strategy was compounded in the Forest of Dean because it was planted with the ‘wrong’ sort of oak trees. There are two forms of oak native to Britain: pedunculate oaks and sessile oaks (
Quercus robur
and
Quercus petraea
). The most easily discerned difference between them is that the acorns of pedunculate oaks hang down on little stalks, while the acorns of sessile oaks sit directly on their twigs. But there are other differences too, and one of these is geographical. The sessile oak is most usual in the north and west, while the pedunculate oak predominates in the south-east. (This is why the sessile oak is sometimes known as ‘Scottish oak’.) It is not clear why this should be the case, and there are exceptions in both directions where you can find the ‘other oak’ growing where you might not anticipate it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pedunculate oaks, for both commercial and aesthetic reasons, were regarded as the best kind:
⁵
in many places and circumstances they show a tendency to grow rather straighter and taller than the sessile variety, and have smaller, more uniform crowns.

Although the Forest of Dean was naturally a sessile oak wood, it was replanted with the supposedly superior pedunculate oaks. The thinking seems to have been that if the inferior oaks grew so well here, then the superior ones would do even better. But it transpired that the new trees did not grow as well as the old ones; in fact, they did not even achieve full normal growth and have never even approached the super-oak status that had been so confidently predicted. In essence, this huge, nearly fifty-year project in the Forest of Dean produced an inferior product which turned out to be obsolete before the work was finished and succeeded only in degrading a large piece of ancient woodland in the process. The moral of this sad tale is that if you are going to plant trees, you should plant local – plant as precisely as possible what has already shown that it likes to grow there. Trees do not grow singly, they grow in communities and have developed to match the environments in which they find themselves. Ideally you should be using seeds from the very wood you are wishing to extend or re-plant. Rackham expresses real concern that this lesson has still not been learned; the EU’s attempts to preserve species has led to rules that require people to plant only from certified stock – but that may come from a different part of Europe altogether and not, genetically, be site specific.

As I have already described, the Forest of Dean has another valuable resource, perhaps less obviously associated with forests: it has mines. The Romans mined and worked iron in the Forest of Dean, and although the mining faltered when Rome withdrew the legions in 410 CE, it did not disappear; it has continued right up until today. By the late medieval period, the Forest of Dean was one of the principal sources of iron for the whole country. Originally iron working needed forests, because it required charcoal, which is difficult to transport. In the seventeenth century, mined coal became more popular, but iron working continued in the Forest of Dean because it also has coal seams.

Many people assume that it was the demand for fuel when industrial manufacturing became widespread that used up the trees and destroyed the woods, but this does not seem likely. The idea is based on three misconceptions: that timber trees were used for charcoal making; that trees, once chopped down, do not regenerate; and that people who made a large investment in the infrastructure that was needed to develop the mining were too stupid to protect their own interests. In fact, timber trees in an environment where it is difficult to cut large wood, because there are simply no good tools to do it with, cannot profitably be used for charcoal: for charcoal you are much better off using deadwood, small wood and the shoots from well-managed coppices. Trees do regenerate after being coppiced – that, indeed, is the whole point of it: regular cyclical coppicing, together with clearing the deadwood, produces a sustainable form of fuel with can be cut to precisely the dimensions required. There is clear evidence that people knew this, and that coppicing cycles were based sensitively on a balance between what size of cut wood was most needed locally (or nationally) and what was best for the trees and the agricultural stock that grazed the forests. Woods seem to have been most efficiently and sustainably managed in those areas where the woodland was closely related to local industry – whether that was providing bark for tanning, larger wood for house building, bundles for faggots, or charcoal – and the wood therefore had a crucial economic value, rather than solely being used for domestic fuel.
⁶

In the Forest of Dean there was always a strong symbiotic relationship between the three industries of farming, forestry and mining. The famous vast oaks, grown for timber, were given space to achieve their desired height and girth, while between them there was plenty of wood pasture and heath land for the agricultural stock, and a well-balanced cycle of coppicing to provide both for domestic need and for the charcoal required for the iron working. Unlike many Royal Forests whose
raison d’être
was more closely related to the needs of deer, the Forest of Dean was ‘uncompart-mentalised’ – the newly coppiced areas were not fenced off to re-grow protected from deer, nor were other animals kept out in order to allow the deer ‘first pick’ at the new shoots.