Digital library VIII: Manwood's Treatise of Forest Laws

It's been a while since I updated the "Digital library of historical environmental law", so here's a new addition, connecting environmental law with Magna Carta: John Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws (4th edition (1717) here). 

GWU Law's Legal Miscellanea explains that Manwood was a barrister, gamekeeper, and Justice in Eyre of the New Forest under Elizabeth I. His Brefe Collection of the Lawes of the Forest was printed in 1592 for private circulation and the first edition of the Treatise, printed in 1598, was entitled A Treatise and Discovrse of the Lawes of the Forrest. The 4th edition (above) was "corrected and enlarged by William Nelson," a practitioner in the Court of Chancery.

Chris Besant, in his 1991 "From forest to field: A brief history of environmental law" (16 Legal Service Bull. 160 (1991)), explains further:

Forest law operated principally to protect two resources: vert and venison. Vert was the timber of the forest, plus any grasses, ground cover or vegetation necessary to support the venison, including cover or vegetation which provided shade. Venison denoted the wild beasts of the forest (hart and hind, hare, boar and wold), chase (buck, does, fox, matron and the roo), and warren (the hare, pheasant, partridge and the cunnie). All of these beasts were privileged and protected from capture within the forest by the forest law, although outside thereof, they could be taken through capture by anyone.

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Magna Carta is a general reaction against the centralisation of government in derogation of the feudal principle. The King in his weakness is forced to concede that he will not 'overreach' his proper bounds as defined by the common and forest laws of the land. Thus the Charter of the Forest is a further delimitation of forest custom in the interests of liberty, and is the beginning of the great destruction of England's natural environment.

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While on its face forest law is a system of game laws, in substance it imposed dramatic and effective restraints on the exploitation of natural resources. It proscribed taking the primary mammalian life of the community and controlled, through the protection of vert, any activity which threatened the natural subsystems supporting the venison. The laws attain a level of specificity reflecting a level of ecological sophistication seemingly lost to the European world until very recent times. Modern ideas of forest management and silvaculture echo through these laws. Manwood provides a classic example:

And those woods of covert that are felled by license, yet the springs thereof must be carefully preserved, that they may grow to be coverts again in short time, for though they have license to fell their woods, yet they had not license to destroy them.

In a sense the forest laws represented one of the last repositories of primitive ecological knowledge of the European. Forest law defined an equilibrium between human resource exploitation (husbandry, agriculture, settlement) and a natural resource ecosystem. That balance represented the experience of generations and was generated by a process no doubt similar to the evolutionary processes by which aboriginal peoples acquired their natural knowledge. The centralisation of these customs by the Normans provided a way of centralising information about forest use as well as controlling forest abuse, so that the equilibrium was maintainable over a vast area. That such a centralisation was initially efficacious is beyond doubt; the Charter of the Forest in its demands for relief from the oppressions of the forest law is a testament to the reality of the forest injunctions.