Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation

FIVE. Sylvan Pastoral and the Civil War: REPRESENTING NATIONAL TRAUMA IN SYLVAN TERMS

FIVE Sylvan Pastoral and the Civil War REPRESENTING NATIONAL TRAUMA IN SYLVAN TERMS In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the townspeople’s invasion of Windsor Forest’s Little Park and their use of deer poaching tropes demonstrate a complex negotiation between informal social control and the power of transgression with the forest as the site to enact such a struggle. But this minor insurrection pales in comparison to an onslaught of destruction the park and Windsor Forest suffered during the civil war. Concomitant to the outbreak of the civil war in 1641, Windsor Great Forest was invaded, and “scores and hundreds set upon the King’s dear.”1 In April 1643 people in Berkshire adjoining Windsor Forest pulled down enclosures surrounding Windsor Park. When they went unpaid, Colonel Venn’s soldiers took the forest’s timber instead. Notorious as well for their poaching, the army decimated the deer population; a 1649 commonwealth survey of Windsor’s Great Park found that no deer remained.2 This region was inundated by squatters who likewise appropriated the land for their own livelihoods, and near this region, Diggers sought to enact some of the era’s most radical ideals by turning the earth into a common treasury.3 Such behavior was not unique to the Windsor environs, and many other royal forests and private woodlands became sites of conflict. Squatting, 157 158 Writing the Forest in Early Modern England deer poaching, timber raids, and the destruction of forest enclosures all took place during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, but during the period initiated by Charles I’s personal rule and extending early into the Restoration, these actions multiplied; when they combined with concurrent debates over religion and politics, the significance of these actions reached an unprecedented and explosive intensity. Throughout the English revolution, writers would appropriate the discourse of sylvan pastoral as a means of responding to these transgressive acts. Attacks on forests and deer parks were especially intense and numerous around 1642, but Daniel Beaver’s nuanced microhistory of several forest regions persuasively demonstrates that forest violence in the decades leading up to 1642 took on an increasingly politicized edge. Although historians largely overlook the role of forest culture in the civil war’s origins, forest related issues cannot be ignored. The politics and their import differed region by region due to the people involved and local customs; however, certain patterns emerge that directly relate to competing ideologies extant during the civil war. According to Beaver, the elusive concept of honor, so closely tied to status and hunting practices, became a flashpoint for developing larger political debates: It is difficult to understand the significance of “law” and “commonwealth ” principles in the forests apart from the honor, status, and reputation to be won in their defense. But forest politics also involved a negotiation between royal claims to the forest as a hunting preserve and the legitimate rights of the commons to fuel, pasture , and other forest resources. The forests, chases, and parks of Stuart England, often dismissed as little more than quirks of early modern power, thus constituted dynamic political arenas, defined by an ideologically charged interplay among the interests of crown, gentry , and commons. This poorly understood political domain served as a platform for some of the highest expressions of royal honor and power and for some of the most radical “commonwealth” aspirations in the popular politics of the early seventeenth century.4 Beaver largely analyzes forest and manorial court records to prove his argument, but as I will argue in the next three chapters, popular writing in poetry and prose engage these issues to such an extent that we find the war itself cast in a sylvan light. Sylvan Pastoral and the Civil War 159 Although scholars of the civil war have overlooked the existence of sylvan pastoral, in engaging with early modern forest culture , this literary mode directly confronts the chaos and aftermath of England’s revolution. As historical and literary scholars know, writers do not record historical “facts” of cataclysmic events in an unmediated fashion. Understanding the literary mode of sylvan pastoral helps reveal how initial contemporary accounts of the war were influenced both by pastoral conventions as well as England’s ongoing preoccupation with its forests. The middle decades of the seventeenth century challenged the foundations of English society upon which rested political, religious, and social structures. In an attempt...