FORESTS.

Consists chiefly of accounts of particular forest officials for the forests in their charge for a period of roughly three hundred years, from the reign of Edward I to that of Charles II. They include those of the two chief forest justices north and south of the Trent, covering numbers of forests, and of local forest officials, such as the keepers of particular parks within the forest, such as Clipstone and Bestwood in Nottinghamshire, and which include accounts for herbage and agistment of beasts, or of commissioners appointed to carry out sales of wood and occasionally in the forest of Dean, charcoal. Especially prominent from the reign of Elizabeth I are regarders' certificates and woodwards' accounts for forests south of the Trent. There is a particularly large set of woodwards accounts for Northamptonshire and Rutland from 1577 to l6 12. Some officials' accounts which might have been expected to be included here are in fact in SC 6, eg SC 6/1297/4.

Many of the accounts of wood sales do not relate to forests at all, some being for non-forest counties like Kent, or those like Berkshire which were disafforested in the early thirteenth century, and are misplaced in a collection of documents relating to forests. Some relate to post-Dissolution sales of monastic woods, or generally to wood sales throughout the country under the auspices of the general surveyors and the Court of Augmentations.

Some of the documents appear to be private or semi-official compilations by local forest officials, which may have found their way into the Exchequer either through accounting needs, court cases or as a result of commissions. Examples are two regarders' books for the forest south of the Trent for 1573-74 (E 101/136/13 and 14), and three of the numerous forest books for Sherwood forest in Nottinghamshire, in which forest officials kept useful precedents and memoranda (E 101/534/1 and 20; E 101/535/1), all belonging to the reign of James I. One of the latter (E 101/534/1) was still in Nottinghamshire as late as 1749, when it was exhibited to a commissioner of the Court of Chancery, so it may have arrived in London as a result of that case, which would mean that it had no Exchequer provenance. Also of particular interest is a book of informations given to the master and surveyor of woods north of the Trent in 1549 (E 101/130/5). There are even odd items of correspondence about woodland matters (eg E 101/675/9).

Some of the particulars of account for officials like the chief justices or keepers of parks lie behind enrolled accounts in the pipe rolls (E 372) or foreign accounts rolls (E 364), which are listed in detail in the List of Foreign Accounts, Lists and Indexes XI, pp 30-38. Other forest records, especially of eyres, are in E 32, E 146 and C 99, and in C 47.