Wychwood Woodmote

The open-air court of Wychwood, meeting four times a year under the Lord Oak, with four verderers holding for life as judges, regarders who walk the wood each September and present its condition, woodwards over particular walks, and agisters who take the pannage money. It hears cutting, pannage, charcoal and timber matters, and its oral decisions are entered in short rolls.

The forest court of Wychwood, which the priory provides and pays for. Its officers are four verderers plus regarders, woodwards and agisters. It keeps the wood's rolls and ledger, hears offences against the wood such as underwood theft, and walks the regard of bounds and no-cut belts twice a year.

Named with it

• Verderer Grace Tunstall · Of the Holding of the Woodmote
• Clerk of the Woodmote Anne Ulnaby · The Woodmote Rolls and Their Use
• the senior verderer (unnamed
• keeps notes on the belts)
• Anne Ulnaby · clerk of the woodmote

Ties

• Harrowgate Priory is principal beneficiary of the wood and ordered the belt valuation
• the Harrowgate Assize has never accepted jurisdiction over it
• receives House Wychmere's agents seriously but does not obey them
• the Crown declined to take the wood into forest law
• provided and paid for by Harrowgate Priory
• fills standing charcoal orders from Saint Aldwyn Engine Company and White Falcon Metals and Aerial
• its clerk has met the sub-prior and the bounty man who read the bounty books

At the table

Its sanction is the loss of rights in the wood, and against it there is no appeal. It upholds eleven no-cut belts, strips of wood in which felling is forbidden, although no known instrument, neither charter nor grant, establishes them; and a felling in a belt it treats as the gravest of offences. When a stranger gives an account of the no-cut belts, the court writes it down word for word. Since the priory lately valued the belts, the wood has been set against Harrowgate. The ground walked in the regard has shrunk from ten thousand acres to seven. Of the families living unrecorded in the middle ground the court deliberately asks nothing, and by a tolerated custom the woodwards do not present them; its verderers take counsel privately with the charcoal-burning families. A Great House charter it treats as evidence, and not as instruction. It pays the best in the March, but only at the half-year, in October or in April, and every engagement is written into its roll. The book calls it the only court in the March that functions. Its standing work includes tracing timber cut from a no-cut belt, the court wanting the buyer and not the cutter, and walking the regard as an independent witness, which the woodwards resist. The clerk's ledger is one of the March's five private records that nobody has yet brought together.