In writing of eleventh-century French law and society, jurist and historian Geoffroi Flach observes, ‘[i]l est peut-être vrai de dire que la liberté est sortie du fond des bois.’ Flach's reflection on ancient verities, of freedoms emanating from ‘the bottom of the woods’, speaks to a truth at the heart of the lawful forest. As the Introduction and Chapter 1 outline, our tale explores the intersection of ancient custom and the public square, and the social and political freedoms that populate this subliminal, contested, inherently potent space. Like Flach's aphorism, our narrative, and this space, is never far from the forest – whether long-felled Norman woods, or the remnant forest that is twenty-first-century London. In this chapter, we write of a vast English acreage of Oak and Ash and Thorn, a forest long gone, scarcely imaginable. Felled first to the till, then to the town, this forest nonetheless persists in its canopied memories. In reaching back a millennium and more, this chapter's aim is to reconstruct (and reconceptualise) what lies at the bottom of these long-disappeared woods.

If ‘the past is a foreign country’, this ancient place seems an alien world. Yet, at some levels, it is not. While separated by the vast gulf of time, we share a common legal landscape, a locus where ancient memories were once enacted, and now linger in the shaded margins – ghostly in their apparition. As Sarah Keenan argues:

The customs at the bottom of Flach's woods comprise deeply held, commonly understood memories of ancient ‘everyday practices and understandings’, hauntings that underline ‘how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence’. This is why, to better understand this seething presence, and its significance to our modern-day lawful forest, we reach back to the distant past – to paint a picture of the customary history that this collective memory draws on; the forest customs that pre-dated (and survived) the Norman Invasion, and those same ancient customs that were reasserted under the Forest Charter of 1217.

The Forest Charter itself is a remarkable instrument, and not merely because of its antiquity.