“Once, that I can find, and the entry is four lines. A man felled in the Stream Head belt in a hard winter, was presented, lost his rights, and left the district. What the rolls do not say is why the court sat out of quarter to hear it, or why the priory sent two brothers, or what the parish did afterward for three years running.”
As the hearths of Wychwood tell it
It was a hard winter, the wood says, and a man took timber from the Stream Head belt. He was presented at the next court, lost his rights in the wood entirely, and left the district. The rolls give it four lines, and if that were all, nobody at the hearths would still be telling it.
Timber never brings the court out of quarter; for this it sat out of quarter. Two brothers came down from the priory, which no common sitting of the woodmote, the forest court, has ever drawn from it. The man’s own parish went further still. For two winters together its bells were rung each night; for a season a watch was kept on its churchyard; and money was found to have the stream beneath the belt blessed. The wood draws its own conclusion. Fear of a court alone has never yet made a parish buy a rite for running water two miles off.
Go and look, if you want the rest. The stumps are there still. The belt has not grown back over them, though the same ground outside it carries timber eighty years old. No cutter will work the falls nearest to it. And the belt days at the Stream Head are worked by two parishes together, which no roll requires.
What is known
Eleven no-cut belts are kept in Wychwood, rather over two thousand acres taken together, and from none of them may anything whatever be taken. Three lie about water, two at springs and the third at the head of a stream. No grant authorises them, no charter, no order of any court. They stand for one reason only, that the woodmote, the forest court, upholds them each time the regarders, the officers who inspect the wood, bring in their report on the belt stones; and every parish at the wood’s edge owes two days in the year to walk the nearest belt and set its boundary stones upright again, working always from outside and never once going in. Ask the wood why the belts are there and it will give four answers, which have never been brought into agreement. One of them unsettles people more than the rest. It holds that the belts were agreed, with terms on either side, and that the wood’s people have kept their half so long that they no longer remember it was ever half of a bargain.
One felling in a belt is all the rolls record, at the Stream Head, and the district held that it wanted mending as much as it wanted punishing. The priory has since caused the standing timber of every belt to be valued, and the sum is written in a book at Harrowgate, on a page beside building work the priory has no means to pay for. The wood has noted where that figure sits and drawn its conclusion, that the timber may one day be wanted. So far nothing has come of it; nor does the wood expect the quiet to last.
