Robin Hood's Barnsdale and Anglo-Saxon England

Once upon a time - historians and academics believed in the myth of the Greenwood, that during the Dark Ages following the end of Roman Britain in 410 and Elizabethan England, that England in the Middle Ages was a forest Kingdom. Now following archaeology and geographical research especially in Southern England, it is felt that deforestation across the UK happened during the neolithic and Britain was not a wooded landscape. We believe the truth lies somewhere inbetween, with strong regional variance.

Anglo-Saxon Forests

Forests are considered by many to be a Norman import, the word being french. In fact Forest Law was established in the Reign of Danish King Canute who "laid a heavy fine on anyone who hunted in a district which he had set apart for his own pleasure." Forest Wardens were maintained by Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor, "The idea of a royal forest, jealously preserved, has been familiar to Englishmen for forty years at least before the Conquest." (p674 ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND - FM STENTON) "In the tenth century, the forest of Sherwood in Nottinghamshire stretched for at least seven miles to North of waht became it's Medieval boundary" (p.281) In Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire a district of BRUNESWALD is the most suggestive of ancient forest, where Hereward the Wake resisted the Norman Conquest of 1066. 

The Sokeman of Danelaw and the Yeoman of the Middle Ages

One of the aspects in the North was the status of the Sokeman, heavily represented in the Norman harrying of the North which had been established by the Danelaw. "The social order of Danish England was distinguished from other regions by what can be fairly called PEASANT ARISTOCRACY, whose members had escaped absorption into the routine of manorial discipline" Basically the duties and freedoms of Sokemen were greater than elsewhere. (p507)

British Kings of Elmet

The Forest Kingdom of Elmet acted as a barrier to Anglian unity in Northumbria between the Southern Anglian Kingdom of Deira and the Northern Anglia Kingdom of Bernicia. The people of Dere (derived from the British word Deifr or Waters) and the Bernice of the North. One King is named as Dutigern at the time of Ida in 547, another later King Certic in 632. For a short time in 632, the Britons in Elmet allied with King Cadwallon of Gwynedd and Anglian King Penda defeated the Northumbrians at Hatfield Chase. Only to be crushed at Rowley Burn, near Hexham in 633.

The Forested region of Barnsdale remained contested between Northumbria and Mercia for sometime before become a contested region between England and the Danish invaders.