THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS HAVE outlined how Ashdown's Commoners had on many occasions asserted their customary rights against those who threatened to enclose land, transgressed local customs regarding cattle numbers or cut and carried away the growth of the Forest to which they were not entitled. These sanctions were supposedly applied through the manorial courts, but, failing this, the Commoners might take matters into their own hands. This chapter relates how local custom encountered attempted legal suppression and how alliances and conflicts within the several strands of Ashdown's agrarian society were enacted.

ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

By the late nineteenth century the preservation of open spaces was becoming of greater concern among educated Victorians. It is often difficult to map the impact of such concerns onto particular places and across the ambiguities of rural class relations, and it is perhaps particularly difficult where forest and wood-pasture environments are concerned. Here semi-independent families, moving between subsistence and dependence on common rights, and with a marginal hold on capitalist relations through their paid labour, could be in more complex relationships with their elite neighbours. ‘[A]ntagonisms between labourers and landholders [were] … nowhere adequately explicable in terms of a simple capitalist–proletarian opposition’, so it is important to move beyond the elite perceptions of ruralist commentators in order to reveal the complexities and inter-relationships of culture, work and environment.

Ashdown was the scene of a struggle between intersecting concerns. It was the local stage for the promotion of environmental advocacy, expressed as the burgeoning conservation and ‘outdoors’ movements. But it was also the stage for local conflicts over the preservation of customary common rights in the face of private property interests. We can see the conflicts from several different perspectives, and now particularly from the autobiographical accounts of working people whose lives and collective practice were woven together across the Forest. These stories are drawn from the notebooks in which they were collated by William Augustus Raper, a young solicitor who set out to reveal the longevity of the exercising of common rights on Ashdown, and about whom more detail will be given below.