Catalogue description Justices of the Forest: Records formerly in the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer, etc

Forest records collected in the Treasury of the Receipt from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, with a few additions made during the twentieth century.

The bulk of the records date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but a single item comes from the reign of Henry II, a few miscellaneous documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and collections relating to the Waltham Forest and New Forest eyres held in the reign of Charles II in 1670.

The records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries consist mainly of records of forest eyres from between 1209 and 1358, including both the plea rolls (in some cases more than one for a particular eyre) and some of the documents prepared by forest officials, such as local foresters, verderers and regarders, for those eyres, mainly of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Such documents survive mainly from the Northamptonshire eyres of 1255 and 1348 and the Wiltshire and Hampshire eyres of 1330.

Also included are records of the proceedings of the local forest attachment courts (often referred to as swanimote courts) which were handed in to forest eyres. This series also contains some records of perambulations of the boundaries of the forests and inquisitions into the state of particular forests (de statu foreste), taken by the chief justices of the forest south of the Trent or their deputies, in the form either of files of original inquisitions, sealed by the jurors, or enrolled copies.

Some of these records were formerly in E 146

For other series of forest records, see:

CHES 33

DL 39

E 146

JUST 1

JUST 4

Justices of the Forest, 1166-1817

For a detailed archival history of forest eyre records, see D Crook, 'The records of forest eyres in the Public Record Office, 1179 to 1670', Journal of the Society of Archivists, XVII (1996), 183-193

Calendars arranged by county and then alphabetically by place, giving the date and the old number are in IND 1/17031 and IND 1/17032; transcript of selected pleas and perambulations in IND 1/17033; Le Neve's index in IND 1/17179