THE AREA THAT BECAME Ashdown is located at the centre of the Weald of South East England. The Forest lies roughly halfway between London and the south coast, accessible from London but remote enough within its Wealden fastness to ensure some degree of privacy. It lies in northern Sussex, close to the borders of Kent and Surrey, and between the modern towns of Crawley, East Grinstead, Tunbridge Wells, Crowborough, Uckfield and Haywards Heath (Figure 1.1). As we shall see, this location has resulted in considerable pressure on this, the largest remaining open heathland in the south-east. In fact, although the area is much given over to commuterdom and has a thriving population, the central Weald has historically been somewhat marginal to administration and legal oversight owing to its distance from the county towns of all three counties: Chichester, Lewes and Maidstone. There was no major trading routeway through here – only the river headwaters and ancient roads that skirt the Forest. The original medieval Ashdown covered about 13,000 acres with a 23-mile circumference and was thus a substantial landscape feature.

WHY ‘FOREST’?

Modern visitors to Ashdown are frequently perplexed by its relative lack of trees – and not just visitors, for some residents also object to the Conservators cutting back encroaching trees and scrub from the heathland. The problem is that there was historically absolutely no formal connection with our modern use of the word ‘Forest’ indicating an extensive area covered by trees. The Norman forests were there to serve the royal elite. They may well have been wooded, but it is more likely that the landscape was interspersed with open ‘launds’ or more scrubby vegetation, and ideal for hunting. Indeed, at one time the royal forests were also controversially extended across all manner of countrysides, primarily as a money-raising venture for the king. The word adopted for these areas was the Latin ‘foris’: ‘outside, from outside’, meaning that they were beyond ordinary law and the normal world of country people.

Forest jurisdiction was by no means limited to unpopulated areas. Forests were superimposed onto older patterns of land management, and royal rights became increasingly unpopular with both the nobility and the powerless lower orders.