Origins

As both a Royal Forest and an extensive area of woodland, Wychwood Forest has been a dominant feature in Leafield life for at least 800 years. The name Wychwood comes from the Saxon name "Hwiccewudu", meaning the woods of the Hwicce, a tribe whose kingdom extended over much of the West Midlands in the Anglo-Saxon period. The first clearance of the primeval woodland was once assumed to be the work of these settlers; however, archaeological evidence produced over the past 25 years has shown the original clearance to be the work of later Iron Age or Early Roman populations, which were many times larger than previously thought. Much of the medieval woodland of Wychwood is now known to have been secondary re-growth over land that had been cleared, settled and cultivated.

The Royal Forest

By the 10th century the Wychwood area had royal associations and in the Domesday Book it is recorded as being a Royal Forest, that is an area where the hunting rights belonged to the king. The area covered by the Royal Forest was not just woodland. Medieval Wychwood consisted of a mix of coppices, where the trees were grown for wood, open forest and heath land used for grazing by the deer and other animals, meadows and cultivated open lands. Its status as a Royal Forest meant that it was governed by strict Forest Laws. The right to hunt game in the Forest, principally deer and wild boar, was the prerogative of the king, apart from on Whit Sunday when the local inhabitants were permitted a hunt . The house in Langley once known as "King John's Palace" was a hunting lodge and a similar place was built in Cornbury Park as a shooting lodge. The lords of the manors within the Forest had the right to take timber and underwood, but only under special licence or under the strict supervision of the Forester. Even so, any extensive clearance of woodland areas to provide farm land was severely punished.

Villagers' rights

Local villagers had some rights. One was to collect dead wood; Leafield villagers still have the right to enter the wood on Tuesdays and collect "a burden of wood", but only as much as one man can carry. Villages including Leafield also had rights of grazing within the forest, including a sheep run which may have dated back to Saxon times, but these rights were lost at the deforestation. It was also customary for villagers to gather nuts and birds eggs in the Forest to feed their families. But these rights were clearly felt by the poor to be too limited and there was a great temptation to make use of the forests resources to supplement their income or feed their families. Poaching and illegal gathering of wood was widespread. It is perhaps typical that the first mention of Leafield by name in any official document was in 1199 when Salomon de la Felde was fined 1 mark for "offences against the vert", almost certainly illegal gathering of wood, an offence he repeated just a year later.