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To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Drawing on historic documents, maps and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the Great North Wood that once covered much of what is now South London. It records its botany, ecology, ownership and management, the gradual encroachment of the metropolis, and the battles fought by locals and the London Wildlife Trust to save what remained.
The lecture will discuss the documentary research into historic land ownership and management in the Medieval and Early Modern periods that informed the book, which draws on a wide range of primary sources, some never previously cited. These include 16th-century Court of Exchequer depositions in a dispute over land ownership, in the National Archives at Kew; Archbishop Morton’s 1492 survey of the Manor of Croydon, and a 1678 plan of the Archbishop’s woods, in Croydon Museum; Archbishop Cranmer’s 1552 survey of the Manor of Croydon in the Bodleian Library; estate maps in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives; parish accounts; and records of woodland management in Dulwich College Archive and Lambeth Palace Library.
Considered together, these scattered records combine to create a picture of the former extent of the wood, which stretched from Deptford to Croydon, its ownership by religious bodies such as Bermondsey Abbey and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and its management by rotational coppicing, which generated income for its owners over several centuries. Tudor Acts of Parliament and the publications of 16th– and 17th-century agronomists such as Thomas Tusser and Barnaby Googe are examined to provide insight into the theory and practice of woodland management at this period.
The book also records how that income dwindled as the Industrial Revolution rendered many woodland products obsolete, leading landowners to grub up coppices, at first for farmland and then, as the railways brought the area within commuting distance of London, for housing development, to the fury of commentators such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.
‘The Wood That Built London’ is published by Sandstone Press, available to purchase in paperback.
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