The New Forest: Hamnet, Shakespeare and forests
- ericawheeler18159
- Apr 28
- 13 min read
I went to see the film Hamnet at the cinema. Beautiful film, brilliant actors. I was moved, by the film and the original play, Hamlet, which features in it. But one of the starring roles was taken by the forest near Shakespeare’s home (the film and book by Maggie O’Farrell is about William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes and family, mostly set in Stratford upon Avon). Agnes, his wife, is a woman of the forest. She has a home in a farmhouse called Hewlands, but spends most of her time in the forest with her falcon, communing with the trees, making plant remedies and lying on the forest floor. As, we find out did her mother. The forest, it would be the Forest of Arden near Stratford, is rendered on film very well. You can hear the thud of feet on its leaf littered bottom, the sway of its leaves, it’s filtered green light, the call of its birds, the acoustics of its under-canopy and it led me to think about the forests in Shakespeare’s plays, how Shakespeare knew forests and woods and the ancient forests we have here in Wessex.
Wood, trees and forestish ways permeate the ‘Agnes’ parts of the film and stand in contrast to the Stratford and London scenes. The wood near Stratford provides the scene for the ‘falling in love’ of William and Agnes, just as it does in some of his plays. The filtered light, the freedom, the forest animals are the background when William tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to Agnes. His story also introduces the idea of the underworld, where Eurydice is condemned forever. The forest also provides an image of a way into the underworld by means of a large hole in the ground, through the roots of an enormous tree. The hole in the trees as a way to the underworld is used again at the end of the film when Shakespeare stages his play Hamlet at the Globe. The spectre of his son steps through the hole in the painted stage-set trees to the other side. So love and death in the forest.
The forest is untamed, uncivilized, spirited, natural, supernatural and pagan. But Hamnet also puts trees into the town. The houses the characters live in are like tamed forests. The amount of timber in their structures are like a forest of tree trunks, the attic space the Shakespeare’s live in is like a canopy of branches. But this time the trees are domesticated: they are cut, sawn, shaved, pegged and jointed. When Agnes comes to these buildings she is tamed too and lives her less wild, less folkloric life. She still goes out to the forest and indeed in the film gives birth there. Hamnet’s Globe Theatre is like a grove in the forest. It too is made of tall timbers with a canopy of branches above and on the stage, a painted set of trees with a dark hole where actors come in and out. And this is where Shakespeare’s exploration of death, ghosts and the afterlife goes on when Hamlet is performed.
Forests in Shakespeare’s plays
Shakespeare used forests in his plays – notably As You Like It, where the action is set in the supposed Forest of Arden, and the Merry Wives of Windsor, where there are scenes in Windsor Forest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the land of the fairies is in a wood.
In his plays his forests have otherworldly elements,– the fairies, sprites, ghosts, phantom horned creatures and witches. Such as Herne the Hunter, an antlered ghost figure that is first documented in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. Or Puck, the mischievous fairy or sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who, working for the king of the fairies Oberon, sprinkles a juice over various characters sleeping eyes to make them fall in love with the first creature they see. This drives much of the action. At one point Puck says:
“I am that merry wanderer of the night, When I, a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, Neighing in likeness of a filly foal”
Shakespeare lived in a world, the late 1500s when such beliefs were still very much alive, but were beginning their wane to rationality and science in the early modern world. But it’s perhaps in forests and mountains, remote from churches, close to the natural elements that these ideas last the longest. The forest setting in his plays is a place where worldly worries can be left behind, closer to nature but also supernature. A playground, a freedom, but also where mischief and humiliation can happen, perpetrated by agile and clever spritely creatures. Where dream-like states can be fallen into and identities lost and found. Where old pagan beliefs might last. Where one can get lost. Anything can happen in a forest, it is apart from the common run of things. Being sometimes dark, sometimes dappled, isolated, twisted growths, sparsely populated and unfenced.
Shakespeare grew up near the Forest of Arden in the West Midlands as a child and young man, which his mother (who came from a village in the forest) and perhaps (his real) wife knew well. From here he might have learnt its folklore. In contrast his urban, learned, literary, civilized life in Stratford and London might have given him the old pagan, classical myths of ancient Greek and Rome, which also feature forests.
Shakespeare’s forest in Wessex?
There is a real forest in Hampshire which resembles an old medieval forest, a ‘Shakespeare’ forest, largely intact despite predations of cutting timber for shipbuilding in the 1700s, tarmacking airfields in the Second World War and tree plantations in the twentieth century: the New Forest. It’s a unique place, now a National Park but sometime a vast royal hunting ground.
First a little terminology. England has a peculiarity in its vocabulary for places with trees. In England forests and woods are different things, going back to medieval concepts. It’s confusing, but the named forests of England, such as the New Forest, Sherwood Forest, Epping Forest, aren’t actually covered in trees, well they aren’t all trees anyway. The word forest was used in medieval times, and arrives with the Norman invasion (1066 AD), to mean an area of land set aside by the king for hunting. Some were huge and were not all covered in trees, but included areas of fields, clearings, heaths and some wooded areas. It made it a bit more fun and interesting to hunt boar and deer that way. The first ones were designated by the first Norman king, William the Conqueror, in the late 1000s. “To the medievals a Forest was a place of deer, not a place of trees” says Oliver Rackham, the great historian of the English countryside. It could be dangerous sport though. Two of William the Conqueror’s sons were killed in the New Forest in Hampshire, (although one death was highly suspicious and the hunting may have been a cover for assassination). Most forests were not hunted in much by the king and his friends – there were far too many for that, even for an enthusiastic hunter-king. But they were used to supply plentiful venison for the king, his court and entourage on the various itineraries they had around the country and the feasts they held. Therefore venison was a royal food. No-one else had access to it.
Woods, on the other hand are privately-owned patches of wooded areas amongst arable, open fields, but often cropped as intensively as farms. There were many valuable products from woods, not limited to timber for building, but poles, hurdles, spars (hazel twigs used in thatching), bark and wood for carving or turning for example bowls (I’ll do another article on the economy of the woods soon). They were created by managing and working the wood by pollarding and coppicing trees. But it was the lord of the manor and his tenants, who had common rights in the wood, who took these, not the king.
The vocabulary meanings are muddied by the use of ‘forest’ worldwide to mean heavily wooded areas – see rainforest, cloudforest and boreal forest, as well as ‘forestry’ to mean the cultivation of trees for harvest, mainly by plantation. But here in England, a forest usually has a royal background, a different legal foundation and is not all trees.
The forests came under a special set of laws called Forest Law, which placed many restrictions on people living there and they became distinct from the areas under Common Law. The Forest Law was laid down to protect the ‘vert and the venison’ – the deer which the kings wished to hunt and the greenery they fed on. Not only could you not hunt the deer yourself, but you couldn’t even keep a dog that might harm the deer. You couldn’t enclose your own land or clear forest land for agriculture or cut timber or undergrowth. Punishments could include death or mutilation. It was always unpopular – common rights had been taken away and the Norman kings had exerted and enforced their royal power over large swathes of the land and population. The Forest Charter was a document sealed by King Henry III in 1217 which eased these laws and punishments off a bit. It was arguably the more impactful document to most ordinary people than the Magna Carta of 1215, which held the king’s actions accountable to the barons. In the Forest Charter collecting firewood, turf (for burning) and grazing your animals – i.e. commoners rights – were granted in the Royal forests. In the New Forest, Hampshire, these rights still exist, they are called Common of Pasture, (grazing cattle, ponies and sheep), Common of Mast (right to turn out pigs to eat beech nuts and acorns or mast), Right of Turbary (collecting peat for fuel, now obsolete), Right of Estovers (firewood) and Right of Marl (collecting clay, now obsolete). Common rights, whether on land under Common Law and owned by a lord of the manor, or under Forest Law on land owned by the monarch, has all but discontinued in the rest of England.
The Forest Law had to have enforcement and administration and this was done by appointing officials – called Verderers – and Forest Courts. There is a good source of how the forests were administered in Shakespeare’s time in John Manwood’s Treatise of the Forest Laws (1598). (available here https://archive.org/details/manwoodstreatis00manwgoog/page/n23/mode/2up ) It lists officials such as the Riding Forester, Woodward, Bowbearer, Regarders and Officer of the Woods. The Verderers would be responsible for enforcement and would hear cases in the Courts of Attachment and Swainmote (for more serious cases). The New Forest still has ten Verderers, holds a Verderers Court each month (every third Wednesday) and has its Atlas of Forest Rights, although these are now vastly different from the original roles of the Verderers and court. They represent the commoners of the forest, resolve disputes and enforce byelaws.
Later, from the 15th century, royal forests were used for supplies of timber, rather than venison. In the case of the New Forest, vast quantities were needed in the 1600s and 1700s to supply the shipyards which were building a large number of huge oak battleships for the Royal Navy nearby. So these forests were never completely wild: they were created by nature, man and livestock and administered as part of the economy. We have no untouched, prehistoric wildwood in England. They are all a mix of human culture and nature. And they weren’t lawless, in fact they were more full of laws than most land. They had always been used, cultivated and shaped by humans and domesticated animals, just not in the way more fertile arable lands were. The rhythms of growth are in decades, not years and the flora and fauna are different. However, they still do contain wild(ish) areas with large, old trees and quiet wooded paths. In the New Forest these are designated ‘Ancient and ornamental’ woodland. And they still feel different to the fenced, hedged and farmed areas around them, more so today than in Shakespeare’s time because of the lack of other unfenced areas now.
“Moss and lichen…clothe trunks and limbs, while butchers broom and strange toadstools grow in the crotches of the roots. These old woods hold the spell of magic”
Heywood Sumner in The Ancient Earthworks of the New Forest.
Visiting the New Forest today
The New Forest is the largest Royal Forest still intact, still mostly owned by the Crown, and since 2005 protected by the fact that it is a National Park. Visiting the New Forest, is like travelling back in time, but not to the prehistoric wildwood, where nature is undisturbed, but to a time when farmers and forest dwellers worked in collaboration with the animals, trees and government to maintain the forest and maintain a way of life. Common rights are associated with houses or indeed hearths, rather than people and Commoners’ animals are all let out onto the Forest to mix together and forage their food. Before the Enclosure Acts of the 1700s, there would have been common land like this for nearby tenants of a manor (a unit of land held by a lord of the manor) all over the country, unfenced, the use of it part of their tenant farmers’ agreements. But common land died a death in the 1700s and 1800s, and the loss of it is what forced many country people to move to cities. In the New Forest it is alive however in the Crown forest lands. Here commoning creates its own type of English, foresty beauty, intertwined with stories, animals and dwellings.
The Forest appears almost magical, with its semi-wild, wandering beasts roaming the heaths and wooded areas. Cattle, ponies, some white, but of all colours and pigs in autumn, give it a sort of Narnia – ‘the animals are as important as humans’- feel. The ponies usually stay reasonably close to the farmstead that they belong to and are hardy, footsure and know the forest well. They are descended from a wild forest breed with a bit of Arab stallion thrown in, which the Victorians thought an appropriate addition. The roaming livestock and wild deer are called the ‘architects of the Forest’ and it is they that create the look of the New Forest, by grazing the understory and tree shoots, exposing the large and twisted trunks of the larger trees.
The commoning way of life is harder to keep up these days, some people who have the rights don’t want to exercise them and it is difficult to make a profit or even a living from it. But those that have lived in the Forest all their lives want to keep it going and there are various government subsidy schemes to help.
In the ‘ancient and ornamental’ sections of the Forest, pollarded trees create strange multi-branched tree crowns. Pollarding is the old woodsman skill of chopping the tree above (livestock) head height, both to harvest the products of the tree – poles, rods, firewood, or timber – and to encourage new growth. It is done at this height to stop deer and other animals eating the new shoots. But if you neglect a pollarded tree, and leave it to grow it will have multiple thick branches growing out, all at the same height as it was cut, like a huge fingered palm. Pollarding also regenerates the tree and creates very long-lived trees. The New Forest has more ancient trees than anywhere in Western Europe, and there are some venerable ones to visit – such as the huge oak in a hedgerow in Minstead, the Knightwood Oak near Lyndhurst, which is the oldest in the Forest (over 600 years old) and the Moyles Court Oak.
The New Forest can add bogs, mires and streams to this other-worldly scene. Typically with dark-looking, reflective water, small pools appear through this empty understory in wet weather and boggy ‘bottoms’ (the New Forest word for the bottom of a valley) can be treacherous mires.
There are beautiful vistas, particularly when the heather turns purple in August, over the huge heath areas or the profusely yellow-flowered, thorny, Furze (or Gorse) pops in the warm sunshine. The deep warm brown of the bracken or the green of the fern in summer is a beautiful sight too. The orange, brown autumn leaf fall makes for beautiful woodland walks and streams criss-cross the Forest, they have names like Dockens Water and Etherise Gutter.
Rare animals, birds, insects and fungi also make the New Forest unique. A refuge if you will, a last habitat. They include the pine marten (once hunted by the royal parties), goshawk, sand lizard and the most fantastically named and rare, scarlet malachite and flame shouldered blister beetles. The shy deer – five species: Roe, Red, Fallow, Sika and Muntjac – are difficult to spot and bound away if disturbed, but you can go to a viewing spot at Bolderwood for a better chance.
There are also some very ancient things in the forest, pagan things, grown over – burial mounds of chieftains perhaps. The Bronze Age burial mounds throughout the forest date from 2,200 BC to around 1,000 BC. A little later (1st to 4th centuries AD) the Romans made pottery here in forest kilns, which can sometimes be found in the forest. So the New Forest does contain some ancient ghosts and relics, and the underworld of Hamnet is there too.
Unlike Shakespeare’s landlocked Forest of Arden, the New Forest has a coastline, as it sits at the far south of Hampshire. You can walk out to the sea and see the Isle of Wight beyond, which adds another element to the experience of this Forest.
Shakespeare’s Puck also makes an appearance in real forest folklore too. The trickster sprite has several names: Pixy, Puck, Collepixie or Colt Pixy. The spirit is often said to appear as a pony, as in A Midsummer Nights Dream. The New Forest Collepixie pony lures travellers to a treacherous bog. It is also said to ‘hag-ride’ horses, which appear all rough and sweated up in the morning with wind-plaits in their manes, having been charmed by the Colt Pixy into a wild gallop through the night. Many places in the New Forest have names associated with the Colle or Colt pixie – Pixey Field, Pucks Hill near Puckpits Inclosure, Pixy Mead and Pucksmoor.
The forest in Hamnet has a real life inspiration in the Forest of Arden and a real life example of an otherworldly forest, with its medieval structure and landscape intact, the New Forest in Hampshire.
Reading about the New Forest
Wanderers of the New Forest by Juliette Bairacli Levy.
Juliette really was a real life Agnes, living in the Forest with her two small children in the 1950s. She lived in a tiny Forest cottage, collecting herbs and plants for her work as a holistic, herbal animal healer. They bathe in pools by the moonlight, talk to the New Forest gypsies and live by forest ways.
New Forest Folklore, Traditions and Charms by Vikki Bramshaw
A well-written introduction to the New Forest, its past and traditions.
Hampshire Days by W. H Hudson
The great naturalist of the early 19th century spends time in and describes the New Forest and its wildlife before the First World War.
The Circling Sky: on Nature and Belonging in an Ancient Forest by Neil Ansell
Cuckoo Hill, The Book of Gorley by Heywood Sumner
A beautiful book, wonderfully illustrated by Arts & Crafts artist and archaeologist Heywood Sumner, describing the forest around his home in Gorley.
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