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Hatfield Forest in Essex, England, is owned by the National Trust. and is 1,049 acres (4.245 km²) of woodland, wood pasture (grass plains with trees), lake and marsh. It is in the parish of Hatfield Broad Oak and lies three miles to the east of Bishop’s Stortford and immediately south of Stansted Airport. It is just off Junction 8 of the M11 motorway. It is open to the public.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Hatfield Forest )〕 The Forest is not particularly near, nor related to the town of Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Rather, in common with several other Hatfields, its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word Hoep-Field meaning Heath-field, or heathland in view of the woodland. Hatfield is the only remaining intact Royal Hunting Forest and dates from the time of the Norman kings. Other parts of the once extensive Forest of Essex include Epping Forest to the southwest, Hainault Forest to the south and Writtle Forest to the east. Hatfield Forest was established as a Royal hunting forest in the late eleventh century, following the introduction of fallow deer and Forest Laws were imposed on areas by the king. Deer hunting and chasing was a popular sport for Norman kings and lords and strictly the word ‘forest’ means place of deer rather than of trees. In the case of Hatfield the area of Forest Law consisted of woodlands with plains. Oliver Rackham, the botanist and expert on the countryside, in his book about the Forest entitled The Last Forest (Dent Books 1976) argues that: “Hatfield is of supreme interest in that all the elements of a medieval Forest survive: deer, cattle, coppice woods, pollards, scrub, timber trees, grassland and fen .... As such it is almost certainly unique in England and possibly in the world …….The Forest owes very little to the last 250 years ….. Hatfield is the only place where one can step back into the Middle Ages to see, with only a small effort of the imagination, what a Forest looked like in use.” ==History== There is no written record of exactly when Hatfield was established as a Royal Forest, but records suggest it was sometime between 1086 and 1225. In 1238 Henry III (while retaining hunting rights) gave the land and trees to Isobel of Huntingdon, daughter of the Earl of Chester. She married into the Bruce family and the Forest remained in their hands until Robert the Bruce had his English lands confiscated by Edward I in 1306. On his death it was given by Edward II to the de Bohun family. The right to venison (deer meat) stayed with the King, but the rights to the wood and soil belonged to the de Bohuns, until 1446 when the family was given the right to the deer as well, shortly after they had been awarded the Dukedom of Buckingham. In 1521, however, the third Duke, Edward Stafford was beheaded by Henry VIII and the Forest reverted to the Crown. After Henry’s death, Edward VI granted the forest to Sir Richard Rich. In 1592 the family sold their interest in the Forest to Lord Morley and in 1612 sold the rest of their Hatfield estate, including the lordship of the manor to Sir Francis Barrington. This resulted in a succession of disputes over ownership and rights in the Forest for the next 200 years. In 1729 it was purchased by the Houblon family. They were a wealthy family, originally from Lille in Flanders (now northern France) and included the first Governor of the Bank of England in 1694. While leaving the traditional woodland management techniques little changed, the Houblons probably sought the help of Capability Brown.〔Betley & Pevsner. ''The Buildings of England - Essex''. Yale University Press, 2007, p. 479.〕 As a result, the lake was created and exotic trees planted (i.e. trees not native to Essex). A picnic house was constructed overlooking the lake and this was decorated using British and tropical shells by Laetia Houblon and this ‘Shell House’ can still be visited today. It stayed in the hands of the Houblon family until 1923, when Edward North Buxton bought the Forest from his deathbed and gave it to the National Trust. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hatfield Forest」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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