FOLLOWING THE CONQUEST, ASHDOWN Forest truly emerges, with documentation that allows us far better insights into its ownership, use, landscape and administration. We also can intertwine its history with the activities of those who were active on the national stage.

In the last chapter we noted land mentioned as being within Æscesdune in the mid-tenth century. If this was Ashdown, it is the earliest mention. But the first undisputed mention is at some point between 1107 and 1115, being the earliest and latest dates of Henry I's issue of writs from Westminster, when he confirmed that monks could continue to use a road across Essessdone:

This immediately raises some points of interest. First, there was therefore a named entity known as Ashdown or Essessdone, at least by c. 1100, and that it was sufficiently well-known for it to be specifically mentioned; secondly, an acknowledged route ran across it during the reign of William I, being possibly the ‘old road’, the Roman road from London to Lewes, or perhaps one of the subsidiary hollow trackways; and, thirdly, the monks whose interests were being upheld were from Battle Abbey, founded in the 1070s in the rape of Hastings.

THE FOREST OR CHASE OF ASHDOWN

Whether or not the Ashdown area was an elite hunting ground during the Saxon centuries, the development of their later equivalences in England begins with decrees made by William I. The new Norman rulers had at least six hunting forests in their duchy by the year 1000, with evidence for one at Jumièges by 716. But it should be noted that dukes, counts and lesser landholders all held lands referred to as forest, and that these areas were important for woodland products, pannage and grazing rights as well as for hunting, which might actually be protected inside enclosures or parks within the forest.