The Forest (4 page)

‘That’s Hugh de Martell,’ he said. ‘Holds large estates west of the Forest.’ And then, just as she had started to remark that he looked a rather cold, disagreeable character, Walter gave an irritating laugh. ‘You can’t have him, little cousin.’ He grinned. ‘He’s already taken. Martell’s married.’

The morning sun was well up in the sky and, although everything was quiet, it still seemed to his wife that Godwin Pride was taking a bit of a chance. Normally he finished soon after dawn. ‘You know the law,’ she reminded him.

But Pride said nothing and went on. ‘They won’t come down this way,’ he finally said. ‘Not today.’

There was a scent of sweet grass in the air. A fly nearly settled on Pride’s neck, but then thought better of it. After another minute or two, a small boy came and stood beside her to watch his father.

‘I can hear something,’ she suggested.

Pride paused, listened, gave her a quiet look. ‘No, you can’t,’ he said.

The hamlet of Oakley consisted of a small scattering of thatched huts and homesteads by a green of close-cropped moorland grass. Across the green was a shallow pond whose surface at present was covered by a straggling carpet of little white flowers. Two small oaks, an ash and several bushes of bramble and yellow gorse overhung the water at various points. Although the grass was short and coarse, three cows and a couple of ponies were grazing on the green. Just behind the hamlet, a gravel track led into woodland where it soon descended, between high banks, to a small river. At the eastern end of the hamlet, set a little apart, was the homestead of Godwin Pride.

Godwin Pride: the two names could hardly have been more Saxon; yet a glance at their owner suggested a different ancestry. He was stooping over his work again now, but when he had straightened up to answer his wife, what a fine figure he had presented. Built long, with a straight back, hair falling in rich chestnut curls to his shoulders, a full matching beard and moustache, a beak of a nose, lustrous brown eyes – all these indicated that, like many of the people living in the Forest, he was, at least in part, a Celt.

Romans had come; Saxons had come. In particular that branch of the Saxon peoples known as Jutes had settled in the Isle of Wight and the eastern part of the Forest, which was known as Ytene – the land of the Jutes. But in that isolated region, whose deep woods, poor heaths and marshland did not invite much attention, a remnant of the old Celtic population had quietly lived on. Indeed, their life on their homesteads, modest but well adapted to their forest environment, had probably changed very little since the ancient and pleasant peace of the Bronze Age.

It was unusual in the reign of Rufus for a man, especially a peasant, to have a family name. But there were several cousins bearing the name of Pride in the Forest –
Pryde
in Old English signifying not so much arrogance, although
there was some of that, as a sense of personal worth, an independence of spirit, a knowledge that the ancient Forest was theirs to live in as they pleased. As Cola the Saxon noble would still advise visiting Normans: ‘It’s easier to coax these people than try to give them orders.
They won’t be told
.’

Perhaps it was for this reason that even the mighty Conqueror, when he had created the New Forest, allowed some compromises. As far as the land was concerned, many of the Forest estates were already royal manors, so there was no need to kick anybody out. Some others he did take over; but many estates around the Forest edge lost only their woodland and heathland to the king’s hunting. As for the people, several Saxon aristocrats like Cola found themselves left in place, so long as they made themselves useful: and whatever it may have cost his soul, Cola had played safe. Other lords did lose their land, as Saxon nobles had all over England; so did some of the peasants, either moving to new hamlets or, like Puckle, living off the Forest. Yet for all those remaining in the area there were compensations.

True, the Norman forest laws were harsh. There were two overall categories of offence: those called
vert
and those termed
venison
. The
vert
concerned vegetation – forbidding the chopping down of trees, the making of inclosures, anything that could damage the habitat of the king’s deer. These were the lesser offences. The
venison
crimes concerned the poaching of game and, most especially, deer. The Conqueror’s penalty for killing a deer had been blinding. Rufus had gone even further: a peasant who killed a stag must suffer death. The forest laws were hated.

But there were still the ancient common rights of the Forest folk; and these the Conqueror left largely intact and even, in places, extended. In Pride’s hamlet, for instance, though a piece of land beside his homestead had been taken under forest law – which Pride regarded as an imposition – except during certain prohibited periods of the year, he could turn out as many ponies and cattle as he pleased to
graze all over the king’s Forest; in the autumn his pigs could forage on the rich crop of fresh acorns; he also had the right to cut turves for his peat fire, gather fallen wood, of which there was always plenty, and to carry home bracken as bedding for his animals.

Technically, Godwin Pride was termed a copyholder. The local noble who now held Oakley hamlet was his feudal lord. Did this mean that he had to go out and plough the lord’s land three days a week and bow his head if his lord passed? Not at all. There were no great manorial fields; this was the Forest. True, he put marl on the lord’s small field, paid some modest feudal dues, such as a few pence for the pigs he kept, and helped if there was wood to be carted. But these were more like rents for his smallholding. He lived, in practice, just as his ancestors had done, minding his holding, and earning useful extra money in occasional labour connected with the king’s hunting and the maintenance of his forest. He was practically a free man.

The forest smallholders did not live so badly. Were they grateful? Of course not. Godwin Pride, faced with this foreign interference, had done what people in such circumstances have done through the ages. First he had raged; then grumbled; finally he had come to a resentful compromise laced with contempt. And then he had settled down, quietly and methodically, to beat the system. This, watched nervously by his wife, was what he was doing this morning.

He had been a child when the land by his family’s homestead had been taken into the king’s New Forest. Just beside their little barn, however, a small strip of about a quarter-acre had been left for them. This was used as a pen where the family’s livestock could be kept and fed in the months when they were not allowed on the Forest. Around it was a fence. But the pen was really not big enough.

Every year, therefore, in the spring when the animals were back on the Forest, Godwin Pride enlarged it.

Not by much. He was very careful. Just a few feet at a
time. First, during the night, he would move the fence. That was the easy part. Then, as the light came up, he would go over the ground minutely, filling in and masking the place where the fence had been before, and using turves he had secretly cut in advance, where necessary, returfing the area he had taken over. By early morning it was very hard to see what he had done. But, to be safe, he would immediately put the pigs on that section. A few weeks of the pigs using it and the ground would be too messy to see anything. The next year the same thing again: imperceptibly the pen was growing.

It was illegal, of course. Chopping down trees or stealing a piece of the king’s land was a crime of
vert
. A tiny encroachment like this, termed a
purpresture
, was not a serious offence, but a punishable crime all the same. It was also, to Pride, a secret blow for freedom.

Normally he would have finished long before this time and the pigs would already have been moved in with as much general mess as possible. But today, because of the big deer drive, he saw no need to hurry. The king’s servants would all be up at Lyndhurst where the deer would be caught.

There were several woodland settlements in the middle section of the Forest. First there was Lyndhurst with its deer trap. Since
hurst
in Anglo-Saxon meant ‘wood’, the name probably signified that a grove of lime trees had once grown there. From Lyndhurst a track led south through ancient woodland until, after four miles, it reached the village in a break in the woods known as Brockenhurst, where there was a hunting lodge in which the king liked to stay. From there the track continued south beside a small river running down in a tiny, steep valley, past the village of Boldre, where there was a small church, towards the coast. The little hamlet containing Pride’s homestead lay over a mile to the east of this river and nearly four miles south of Brockenhurst, at a point where the belt of ancient woodland
gave on to a large heath. Even as the crow flies, the hamlet was nearly seven miles away from Lyndhurst.

The huntsmen, he knew, were going to drift the deer down from the north into the trap. Every one of the king’s Forest servants would be up there; none of them would be coming down his way that morning.

With an almost deliberate slowness, therefore, he was taking his time, inwardly chuckling to himself at his wife’s anxiety and annoyance.

So he was more than surprised, a moment later, when he heard his wife give a little cry of alarm and looked up to see two riders approaching.

The morning had gone by quietly for the pale deer. For several hours her little herd had remained feeding in the open as the sun rose higher.

They were all does or fawns, since the adult males had mostly begun by this season to dwell apart. A slight swelling of their flanks indicated that a number of the does were pregnant; in another two months they would give birth. The fawns who still accompanied them were weaned now. The male fawns exhibited the bumps which later in the year would grow into their first horns – the little spikes which, when they are yearlings, give them the name of prickets. Very soon, now, the prickets would forsake their mothers and move away.

Time passed. The birds’ chorus subsided to a tuneful twittering, which was joined, in the increasing warmth, by the quiet whirr, drone and buzz of the countless forest insects. It was mid-morning before the senior doe who was the leader indicated by stalking into the trees that it was time to go to the day rest.

Deer are creatures of habit. True, in spring, they might wander away in search of choice feeding – visiting the fields of grain by the forest edge or, leaping his fences like silent shadows in the night, raiding the smallholdings of men like
Pride. But the old doe was a cautious leader. Only twice that spring had she left the square mile that the herd usually inhabited; and if some of the younger does, like the pale deer, had felt restless, she had showed no sign that she meant to satisfy them. They followed the same path, therefore, that they always used to reach the day rest – a pleasant and sheltered glade in the oak woods – where the does obediently sank down to their usual position, lying with legs tucked in and head erect, their backs to the faint breeze. Only some of the prickets, unable to contain themselves, moved about, playing in the glade under the old doe’s watchful eye.

The pale deer had just lain down when she thought about her buck.

He was a handsome young fellow. She had noticed him at the time of the last rut in the autumn. She had been too young to take part then, although she had seen the fully grown does being serviced. He had been watching with the other junior bucks beside one of the lesser rutting stands; she had guessed from the size of his antlers that the next year he would be ready to claim a stand of his own.

The male fallow went through a series of growth stages, marked by the size of their antlers, which they cast each spring in order to grow a new and finer set for the next rutting season. After the spikes of the yearling pricket came the little antlers of the two-year-old, the sorel. The next year he became a sore, then a bare buck and then, at five, the proper antlers of the buck appeared. Even now, another two or three years would pass before he was fully grown and his antlers developed into the magnificent crowning set of the great buck.

Her buck was still young. She did not know where he had come from: for the bucks usually made their way to their rutting stands from home bases in other parts of the Forest. Would he be at the same stand this coming autumn, or would he perhaps be large and strong enough to dislodge
the occupant of some more important stand? Why had she especially noticed him? She did not know. She had seen the great bucks with their mighty antlers, their powerful shoulders and swollen necks. Crowds of does clustered eagerly around their stands where the air was thick with the pungent odour they exuded and which made the pale deer almost dizzy. But when she had seen the young buck waiting modestly by the stand, she felt something else. This year his antlers would be bigger, his body thicker. But his scent would be the same: the sharp but, to her, sweet smell of him. It was to him, when the rutting season came, that she would go. She stared at the treetops in the morning sun and thought of him.

The terror began suddenly.

The sound of the hunters came from the west. They were travelling faster than the breeze, which might have carried their scent. They made no attempt to be quiet; they came loudly through the Forest, straight towards the glade.

The leading doe got up; the others followed her. She began to spring towards the trees. The prickets were still playing at the other side of the glade. For a moment they did not heed the calls of their mothers, but in another instant they, too, realized that something was amiss and began to spring.