Catalogue description Swanimote Court Rolls and Files of Windsor Forest

Largely paper files of presentments made at swanimotes, rather than formal enrolments of court proceedings on parchment.

They may owe their survival to the Windsor forest eyre of 1632, although a few items are of later date. In the 1630s, after the eyre, the rolls become larger and have original summonses of the earl of Holland as chief justice of the forests south of the Trent sewn to them. They seem to bear witness to a more rigorous regular administration of the forest in the period following the eyre.

Some records relating to Bagshot bailiwick in Surrey are now in C 99

An inventory of these records was printed in the Fifth Report of the Deputy Keeper of Public Records (1844). The current practices of the swanimote are described in J Manwood, A Treatise of the Laws of the Forest (3rd ed, 1665).