Forest vert: the holly and the ivy

Forests were precisely bounded areas devoted primarily to hunting ‘venison’, which mainly comprised deer. They covered large areas of the countryside and continued to exist through early modern times. The forest laws that facilitated hunting also protected, as ‘vert’, the vegetation through which deer were chased and in which they fed, bred and sheltered, but allowed the use of vert for many purposes unconnected with hunting, exercised by forest lords and their officers, land-holders, commoners, and outsiders. Forests were, therefore, typical of the common pool resource systems that existed before land was privatised for the pursuit of financial profit by individual owners, and remarkably complex arrangements governed the use of many items of vert: branches removed from timber trees to allow their transportation; trees and branches blown down by the wind; small branches that could be pulled down by hand; twigs and other dead wood that had fallen from trees and bushes; old hedges; tree bark, and browse wood cut by foresters to feed deer; were all used by different people in sequence, for house building and maintenance, hedges, household fuel, fodder for domestic animals, and financial income. Holly and ivy had special significance within these complex mélanges of rights over forest vert, and holly bore the crown because of its pivotal significance for ‘the running of the deer’.