The Gidea Hall timber sales of 1808 and 1809

In 1808 and 1809, there were two large sales of timber from the Gidea Hall estate near Romford in Essex. This essay examines the connection between these well-publicised auctions and a crisis in Britain's naval defence in the later years of the Napoleonic Wars, and attempts to discuss the nature of the timber that was offered for sale.

Gidea Hall, one of the most imposing mansions in south Essex, had been rebuilt by a wealthy City merchant, Sir John Eyles, shortly after he had acquired it around 1720.^[1] Chapman and André's atlas of Essex, published in 1777, shows it standing in a park of about 150 acres.^[2] However, successive maps indicate that the parkland area varied considerably. As discussed later in this essay, I make a distinction between the formal park, about eighty acres of gardens, lawns and ornamental trees and (borrowing here a modern recreational term) the 'country park', essentially three large fields to the east that some mapmakers included and others treated as farmland. (In the eighteen-nineties, this 'country park' in effect became Romford's golf course.) In practice, the distinction between the two halves may not have been particularly important, since all country house parks were in effect run as cattle ranches, there being no alternative to grazing to keep the grass under control. It is also argued below that the most of the parkland of 1808-9 had probably begun to take shape about 140 years earlier, with extensive remodelling likely at various dates after 1720. This is importance in estimating the maturity of the elms and oaks sold in the auctions, since their life cycles considerably exceed the timeframe of park development. In addition, the estate included another 350 acres of farmland, mostly to the east.^[3]  

In 1745, Gidea Hall passed to the Benyon family, but a fortunate marriage gave them a second and larger property in Berkshire where, by the end of eighteenth century, the third generation preferred to reside. In 1803, the mansion was described as "uninhabited" and both the house and the grounds were "now suffering from neglect".^[4] The Benyons had twice tried to sell the estate in the previous twenty years before it was purchased in 1802 by Alexander Black: the necessary refurbishments seem to have prevented him from moving in for two years. Although his name is still formally associated with the ornamental lake in Romford's public amenity, Raphael Park, although this existed by 1777, and with the bridge over the stream that emerges from it, very little seems to be known about Black. Andy Grant, a historian with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Romford, identifies him as a Scotsman who became a London merchant and made his money in the linen trade.^[5] It is entirely understandable that, after half a dozen years as owner of the property, Black should have felt confident in reorganising its resources, especially after two decades of neglect. He may be acquitted of any suspicion of asset-stripping. Since he was to live at Gidea Hall for another quarter of a century, until his death in 1835, it would certainly not have been a good idea to denude and disfigure its surroundings.^[6]

The contexts

[a] Napoleon and the Baltic By the end of 1806, the long-running war between Britain and France had reached stalemate: the Battle of Trafalgar had underlined British supremacy at sea, the battle of Austerlitz gave France control of most of mainland Europe. The combatants turned to economic warfare: Britain's Orders in Council declared France subject to a blockade that would strangle its external trade; Napoleon's Continental System attempted not only to exclude British exports from European markets but also – a point relevant to the Gidea Hall timber sales – to prevent Britain from gaining access to vital raw materials. On balance, France lost the confrontation. Despite dominating Europe from the Pyrenees to the Baltic, Napoleon's grip on Spain was less secure, while Portugal openly provided a conduit for British goods to enter mainland Europe. Intervention to bring the Portuguese to heel touched off the Peninsular War, a drain on French military resources that eventually enabled Wellington enter their homeland by the Pyrenees backdoor in 1814. The British invasion of south-western France triggered the overthrow of an Emperor weakened by his disastrous Moscow campaign, itself motivated in part by a determination to force Russia into his economic orbit. Britain's trade was certainly damaged by exclusion from continental markets, but extra-European commerce was already more important to its export industries: the danger of a rupture with the United States was probably a greater threat. Furthermore, although Napoleon could issue bombastic decrees, a lively culture of smuggling across the narrow seas did much to undermine their effectiveness.^[7]

However, there was one commodity that was too bulky for smugglers to handle and too strategically vital to be ignored. Britain's Navy required high quality hardwood timber: oak for the hulls of battleships, pine for their masts. Oak trees took generations to produce the quality of planking that could withstand cannonballs fired at close quarters.^[8] Naval shipbuilders used them in massive numbers: it is claimed that six thousand oaks were used in Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory.^[9] Nelson commanded 27 battleships at Trafalgar. Six hundred vessels, nearly half of them warships, were mobilised to carry the Walcheren expedition of 1809 across the North Sea. At various times for several centuries, commentators had warned that British naval superiority was threatened by a developing shortage of venerable and robust oak trees. Oliver Rackham, the insightful historian of the woodlands, regarded these jeremiads as alarmist, since the country's timber resources sustained growing fleets of sailing ships well into the nineteenth century, when sail began to be superseded by the iron steamship.^[10]  However, there can be little doubt that supply was seen as a problem in 1808-9. British shipbuilders had relied on the importation of oak from the Baltic to supplement domestic supplies. The seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807 had ensured continued access to that enclosed sea, which a British squadron patrolled without hindrance. But while Britannia ruled the waves, Napoleon controlled most of the ports, and the Danes, no doubt understandably, sided with France, cutting off supplies but the forests of their Norwegian dependency. Sweden was the only Baltic country to maintain formal trading links with Britain, but the hazards of war reduced the number of ships crossing the North Sea by half. From the east coast of the Baltic, the timber trade up almost totally dried up. Danzig (now Gdansk) usually exported four hundred shiploads of heavy oak timber to Britain each year, but the trade collapsed entirely in 1808-9. Mast timber was hit even harder. Memel (Klaipeda) was normally the source of around one thousand masts annually, but this dropped to 42 in the same period. It took a little longer for restrictions to bite in Riga and St Petersburg, but their mast trade virtually disappeared in 1809-10. In England, the price of high quality timber doubled.^[11]

In fact, an alternative source of mast timber was mobilised relatively easily. When Britain had lost control over the forests of New England during the later stages of the American War of Independence, attention had turned to the pinewoods in the back country of the Atlantic seaboard colony of Nova Scotia, carved out as the separate colony of New Brunswick in 1784. Supplies of mast timber from New Brunswick increased throughout the seventeen-nineties, but these supplies were soon overtaken by exports from the adjoining province of Canada. When war against France was renewed after 1803, a major effort was made to exploit the timber resources of the St Lawrence and Ottawa valleys: by 1807, four times as many masts were shipped from Quebec City as from the ports of New Brunswick. Canada (the modern provinces of Quebec and Ontario) proved even more important as a source of oak, which was not a common tree in the Maritimes. Essentially, British North America replaced the Baltic as Britain's source of hardwood timber. Indeed, between 1809 and 1813, Parliament imposed heavy protective duties on timber imports from Europe to compensate the Canada merchants for their higher freight costs – duties that were the last to be removed in the mid-nineteenth-century struggle for free trade. So dramatic and successful was the sudden timber supply bonanza from across the Atlantic that Britain effectively turned its back on a source of supply that, a few years earlier, it had regarded as strategically vital. Colonial pine solved the problem of the supply of masts, and Canadian oak supplied the perceived deficiency in quantity. Nonetheless, in terms of quality, North American white oak was regarded as inferior to the European variety for the construction and maintenance of warships. It was a measure of the sense of crisis that, in 1809, agents of the Navy purchased oak from Albania, a virtually unknown country in the Balkans. Albania was an unstable region where nobody would willingly have engaged in trade – not least because the rudiments of commerce barely existed, and shifting such a bulky cargo constituted a major challenge.^[12] Even the sceptical Rackham conceded that buying tree trunks from the mercurial local despot, Ali Pasha, was evidence of a serious problem in the supply of oak.^[13] Britain would largely solve its hardwood timber problem by exploiting its colonies in North America. But that should not disguise the fact that 1808-9 was the pinch-point when the strategic need for oak and elm seemed to face a crisis.

[b] A national hero on the doorstep Alexander Black was a shrewd businessman and no doubt capable of appreciating that the timber resources of Gidea Hall were a saleable asset.  But it is possible that he was encouraged to engage in large-scale clearance by a neighbour who was exceptionally well informed about the needs of the Navy. In 1784, through the inheritance of his wife, a naval officer called Sir John Jervis had become the owner of a small country house called Rochetts, at South Weald: the two properties were about four miles apart. He was a vice-admiral when war broke out against revolutionary France in 1793, and was soon promoted to full admiral and given command of Britain's Mediterranean fleet. In 1797, Jervis defeated the Spanish fleet at the battle of Cape St Vincent, preventing the junction of the French and Spanish navies and thereby saving Britain from the threat of invasion. In fact, the triumph was largely owed to the highly creative interpretation of the admiral's battle orders by his second-in-command, Horatio Nelson, who took his ship out of line to block the enemy's escape, but it was Jervis who became the chief focus of the outburst of popular rejoicing. He was granted a very large pension plus a peerage, with George III himself insisting that Sir John Jervis should become Earl of St Vincent, a rare example of a territorial title taken from a location outside the United Kingdom.^[14]

Four years later, the resignation of the long-time Prime Minister William Pitt made necessary the formation of a new government, under Henry Addington. St Vincent became First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister in charge of the Navy, pledged to "a radical sweep of our dockyards", which were notorious for corruption and inefficiency. Close investigation revealed that the scandals were worse even then St Vincent had suspected, but their exposure made him powerful enemies. However, the smashing of both the French and Spanish fleets by Nelson's brilliant victory at Trafalgar in 1805 conclusively disproved unscrupulous allegations that his term of office had weakened the British Navy. By that time, St Vincent was also back at sea: Addington's government had fallen in 1804, and the admiral – now nearing seventy – took command of the Channel fleet. In April 1807, he resigned from active service and retired to Rochetts, occasionally emerging to speak in the House of Lords.^[15] 

Sir John Jervis, who lived at nearby South Weald, became a national hero and Earl of St Vincent after neutralising the threat from the Spanish navy in 1797, although he owed his victory to an imaginative interpretation of battle orders by his second-in-command, Nelson. As First Lord of the Admiralty (1801-4), Lord St Vincent placed particular emphasis on the supply of high quality oak timber for the Navy. Presumably he looked smarter in uniform. 

Thus it may be useful to note that Alexander Black's near neighbour at South Weald was a massively respected national hero whose journeys to London would have made him familiar with Gidea Hall and its surrounding parkland. Both as a sailor and a naval administrator, St Vincent had an expert knowledge of timber: we may be certain that when he looked at trees, he saw ships. As First Lord of the Admiralty, his policy had been "to contract for all the British oak of whatever serviceable dimensions he could procure". He had also imposed "rigid" standards of inspection upon imports from the Baltic and supplemented supplies of oak for ship-building by importing Indian teak, perhaps the only other hardwood capable of resisting cannonballs.^[16] It is likely that he was also well-informed about the local timber resources of south Essex. Success had made him wealthy and impatient to make his country residence reflect his newly acquired aristocratic status. Stately homes were usually years in construction, but Rochetts was enlarged to become an instant mansion by the addition of a tile-hung, timber-framed extension, reportedly erected in just six months as the desperate expedient of an architect cowed by the admiral's angry reprimand that "can't" was not a term in the naval vocabulary.^[17]

It is thus possible to suspect that the Gidea Hall timber sales of 1808-9 were connected with Lord St Vincent's retirement to his country home in 1807. However, the historian must remember the Latin tag post hoc ergo propter hoc: merely because one event follows another, this does not prove that they were causally connected. Lord St Vincent's status as a national hero would no doubt have made his advice to harvest the Gidea Hall oaks hard to resist. Equally, there is plenty of evidence that landowners were well aware of the potential value of their timber resources. Moreover, historian Andy Grant points out that Alexander Black was accused of profiteering in the supply of tents to the Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and he may not have been on close terms with the stables-cleaning admiral at nearby South Weald.^[18]

In any case, the Navy was not the only customer for hardwood. The eighteenth-century demographic explosion is another important contextual element in understanding the background to the 1808-9 Gidea Hall timber auctions. Estimates vary, but it seems that the overall population of England and Wales increased from under six million around 1700 to over nine million by the close of the century, increasing the demand for the construction of houses.^[19] With so many more mouths to feed, Britain also became dependent upon imported food. War with France from 1793 interrupted overseas supplies, leading some enterprising landowners not merely to fell trees but to take the further step of stubbing up their roots so that former woodland could be ploughed and converted into arable.^[20] As discussed below, this may have been one of the elements behind the Gidea Hall timber sales.

[c] London, a city built on wood? Growing prosperity throughout the eighteenth century was reflected in the rebuilding of large mansions and the sprouting of smaller country houses, especially around London: in Havering – Romford and Hornchurch – at least a dozen such projects were made possible after the upgrading of the Great Essex Road in 1722 into a turnpike that provided relatively access to the capital for wealthy City businessmen seeking a rural retreat. Each of these dozen projects must have consumed a considerable amount of timber, much of it probably sourced locally.^[21]

Above all, we should note the importance of London, where the population doubled in the century before 1800 to around one million people – and the metropolis probably absorbed another two hundred thousand during the first decade of the nineteenth century.^[22] Following the Great Fire of 1666, brick had become the preferred building material, but high-quality timber was still required for floorboards and rafters, doors, window frames and fencing. London's historians have tended to take for granted the city's continuing reliance upon wood. True, by 1700 the metropolis was burning half a million tons of coal each year, and its increasing size and its developing dependence upon steam power made it steadily dirtier.^[23] However, coal fires need kindling to get started, and London must have consumed vast numbers of firewood faggots.^[24] Indeed, wood was not always a mere ancillary heat source: in 1792, the House of Commons noted that "[t]he high Price of Coal … undoubtedly tends to increase the Consumption of Wood for Fuel".^[25] Bakers and maltsters preferred the even quality of the heat from wood-fired ovens.^[26] Although much of the Industrial Revolution passed London by, the capital remained a major centre of traditional manufacturing in such crafts as leatherwork, furniture making and brewing. Tanneries used the tannin (the clue is in the name) from oak bark in vast quantities: prices were high around 1800, perhaps because of competition for dyestuffs from Britain's burgeoning cotton and woollen textile industries.^[27] Upmarket cabinet-makers, who were concentrated in central London, worked with quality imported timber such as mahogany, but the domestic household market was served by workshops in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, conveniently located to tap into Essex resources.^[28] Wisely avoiding the unhealthy water supply, Londoners consumed oceans of beer. By the late eighteenth century, metropolitan breweries were producing seven million barrels a year.^[29] Of course, beer barrels could be reused, but it is unlikely that they were all recovered and the skilled trade of cooperage is testimony to a continuing demand – and oak was the only timber that was watertight, bendable and strong enough to hold several hundred gallons of beer. All of these activities mean that the vital role of timber in city's trades and the voracious demand of Londoners for trees is easily overlooked.

Timber was also crucial to London's principal economic function, as Britain's dominant port. Despite the rise of provincial rivals, in 1790 a short stretch of the Thames below London Bridge handled two-thirds of the country's overseas trade.^[30] The riverbanks were packed with wharfs, quays and jetties, all reliant upon hardwood piling driven into the aromatic mud. London was also a major shipbuilding centre, accounting for about one-sixth of the national output. In 1791-2, 16,000 tons were launched. The average size, around 134 tons, was considerably smaller than the 2,200-ton HMS Victory but, if Nelson's flagship consumed six thousand oaks, collectively the Thames yards were constructing three-and-a-half of them each year, and using over 20,000 oak trees.^[31]

The demands of London alone made timber an attractive asset for exploitation by nearby landowners. As a marketable commodity, trees – especially the hardwood oak and elm – had the additional attraction of low wastage. One a tree was felled, its branches were hewn off and sold separately as 'lops and tops'. Larger branches from oak trees were often curved, making them valuable for use as 'knee timber', natural joists ('ribs') for the keel of a ship or roof timber: in Tudor times, it was said that "no oak can grow so crooked but it falleth out to some use".^[32]

Other trees also had multiple uses. Smaller branches could be used for post and rail fencing, especially ash, hazel and poplar which produced flexible limbs that could be woven into hurdles. The smallest sprigs and twigs were wrapped into faggots and sold for firewood.^[33] The last marketing challenge was to deal with the inconvenient problem that trees have (roughly) circular trunks but commercial timber is sold in rectangular beams. Given that an oak with an average diameter of 24 inches will form "sided timber" when squared of about eighteen and a half inches,^[34] there would seem to be a considerable amount of wastage. However, the shavings or 'sidings' include the valuable resource of bark; as noted above, oak bark was the source of dyestuffs needed in tanning and textile manufacture, while the rest of the sap wood could be sold as fuel.^[35] The relative values of the component elements can be illustrated by a sale of trees felled in Hainault Forest in 1794, in which 28 'loads' realised £530. A load was fifty cubic feet, so the consignment amounted to 1,400 cubic feet of timber. The consignment was made up of rejects from a larger felling for the Navy, trees presumably too small for the dockyards to accept. This probably explains why the timber sold for £69, half the £140 paid for the lops and tops – but the bark realised £312, three-fifths of the total return.^[36] It is not surprising that in 1801 an informant of the agricultural expert Arthur Young despaired of lack of foresight displayed in the management of timber resources in Essex. "The woodlands of Essex are extensive, and would supply a vast quantity of well grown straight timber, could the proprietors be induced to suffer them to stand till they arrive at their full size".^[37] As a result, "the very distant prospect of seeing young trees become fit for His Majesty's dockyards" disappeared in the short-term scramble to cash in on a valuable asset. Perhaps Lord St Vincent urged the needs of the Navy upon Alexander Black, but it is noteworthy that the two Gidea Hall sales were by auction and not direct to the government. Perhaps we should conclude that the real surprise was not that the estate should have auctioned large quantities of timber in 1808 and 1809, but rather that its resources had apparently been left untouched for so long.

The Gidea Hall trees The two Gidea Park auctions were both held at the Unicorn, a wayside inn in the hamlet of Hare Street, a main-road settlement at the gates of the Gidea Hall estate.^[38] They were announced in small advertisements in The Times, which naturally do not supply much detail.^[39] On offer in 1808 were 170 elms, 150 oaks, 150 beech and massive 900 ash trees, which were described as "fit for hurdles and other purposes".^[40] In addition, there were ten "Asp" and 3,000 faggots of firewood. The January 1809 sale featured "[t]he very capital oak, elm and timber as now standing on the Estate of Gidea Hall, at Hare-street", this time in different proportions: "about 330 oak trees", 540 elms, 150 ash trees and 60 "soft wood trees", plus "about 400 oak, elm, ash pollards". An enigmatic note added: "The oak is from 20 to 60 feet meetings [sic], and the elms chiefly large." "Asp" was presumably an abbreviation for "aspen", an alternative name for the poplar, possibly here referring to the black poplar, once a common tree in the English landscape.^[41] Softwood trees (the term is now usually spelt as one word) include pines and spruces, which may have been introduced as parkland features during the eighteenth century, although Gidea Hall also had an alley of lime trees, which produce very soft wood indeed. The staccato information of the advertisements invites speculation which may perhaps tell us more than the bald list may seem to reveal.

It is evident that the two sales differed: in the first, the offer of 3,000 faggots indicates that the trees had already been felled, whereas the second sale referred to "standing timber" which buyers would have to collect for themselves. The trees were to be sold "in convenient lots … as numbered", which suggests that batch numbers had been painted on the trunks as identification. It may also be significant that the sales occurred at different seasons of the year.  Midwinter was "almost universally recognised" as the best time to harvest trees, "while the sap was down and in a quiescent state", timing that would "ensure a better quality, and to be conducive to the greater durability of the timber". However, if the priority was to cash in on the bark, trees were felled in the spring, when the sap was rising, thereby enriching the tannin that would generate dyestuffs.^[42] Perhaps the primary motive for the April 1808 sale was to harvest the bark, although it may be more likely that the trees had been felled some months earlier and were being offered for sale after they had been processed to remove the bark and package the faggots.

Harvesting trees Broadly speaking (for I simplify and generalise here) there are three ways to harvest and profit from a tree. The first, simplest and most obvious, is to chop it down and divide it into trunk, bark plus lops and tops, as already discussed. However, simply felling a healthy deciduous tree does not usually kill it: woodland is generally only destroyed when the roots of fallen trees are stubbed up. Stumps are likely to sprout again and some species, such as ash, will generate vigorous shoots that quickly grow into poles, which have many uses, such as providing the framework for hop gardens. It was probably in the late fifteenth century, when policy-makers in England first began to worry about the retreat of natural woodland, that this natural process of regeneration was encouraged in a systematic way through a technique called coppicing.^[43] The practice began of felling a section of  woodland in which the trees were then left to grow again, to be harvested in cycles of eleven to fifteen years, according to local circumstances.^[44] The area was usually fenced, so that a small area of relatively low timber came to be called a 'coppice' (or 'copse'). Fencing was necessary to keep out cattle and deer, animals that found the shoots appetising and represented a threat to natural regrowth, for the stumps eventually die if they cannot regenerate.  (Rabbits were an even greater menace since they do not respect fences.)

In forests and parkland, where it was not economic to shield individual trees from grazing animals, a variant form of coppicing developed. From about 1600, the practice was called 'pollarding', but Rackham traced written references to the technique back to the fourteenth century in Essex.^[45] Pollarding involved removing the lops and tops and, if necessary, the upper part of the trunk at a height above the reach of cattle and deer, and inaccessible to all but the most intrepidly mountaineering of rabbits.^[46] The remaining trunk, called a bolling (it rhymed with rolling), was left to sprout branches, and subsequently harvested like the stool of a coppiced tree, but at a higher level above the ground.^[47] The process considerably extended its productive life, making it theoretically possible that some Gidea Hall trees had been harvested for centuries – although, as discussed below, the vicissitudes of the property's history made such continuity unlikely.  Pollarding was skilled work, since the axeman had to operate on a ladder, and this may explain why the 1809 Gidea Hall auction required those who purchased the pollards (the general name for the parts removed) to undertake their own harvesting. The practice fell out of general use during the nineteenth century. This accounts for the strange extra-terrestrial shapes of the hornbeam pollards in Epping Forest, and the neglect could also be seen in early twentieth-century photographs of the Gidea Hall estate.^[48] Thus coppicing and pollarding were two forms of the same timber management practice designed to extend indefinitely the useful life of a tree by repeated cropping. Coppicing was probably rare in the Gidea Hall park because cattle would have been used to keep the grass short, but the offer for sale of four hundred pollards in 1809 proves that the practice was followed on the estate. Unfortunately, we do not know whether there was a continuous overlapping cycle, with several hundred trees pollarded each year, or whether the 1809 auction was a once-in-a-ten-or-fifteen-year bonanza.

A pollarded lime tree at Gidea Hall, 1911

The third and rather clumsy way of making use of timber from a tree was simply to cut off the lateral branches, a practice usually adopted by poor people in search of fuel. Twenty-first century urban culture would probably call this "lopping", but in earlier times that term was also used more generally to describe pollarding.  Communities around Epping Forest enjoyed various traditional folk rights to cut wood and one, Loughton, stoutly and on the whole successfully defended its claims. Here there may have been some distinction between topping and lopping.^[49] Hacking off lateral branches as a form of pruning was an exercise censured by experts,^[50] although Victorian disapproval centred more on fears that the availability of free firewood allowed the poor to refuse to work and hence made them harder to control.^[51] However, one variant of pollarding was "shredding", in which all the lateral branches of a tree were repeatedly hacked off, leaving only a small crown and creating a tall if distended trunk.^[52] The practice does not seem to have been widely used in Britain, but it would seem to have had two attractions in relation to avenues of trees in parkland.^[53] First, it made sense to remove the lower branches to make as much space as possible for the walkway between the groves. Second, ruthless trimming would accentuate the impression of a tree's height and, indeed, probably encouraged it to grow upwards, the only direction in which it could expand, thereby adding to the dominance of a planted avenue in the landscape of a park. Shredding seems to be the only explanation of the curious statement in the 1809 advertisement that the oaks on offer were "from 20 to 60 feet meetings". Although I have not found a specific dictionary definition of 'meetings', the context suggests that it refers to the point where branches diverge from the trunk. A sixty-foot high branchless oak trunk is virtually an impossibility. The octagon of Ely, a vast skylight above the cathedral crossing, was constructed between 1328 and 1342. The plan called for sixteen oaks, each forty feet in length, two-thirds of the Gidea Hall monsters. Yet, despite the power and the wealth of the medieval bishops of Ely, only ten full-sized trunks could be located, and the design had to be adapted to make use of six shorter trees.^[54] With increasing demand for timber in the following centuries, naturally grown giant oaks became increasingly rare. When the West India Docks were constructed in 1799-1801, a crucial feature of the project was the giant lock at Blackwall which gave access to, and protection from, the river Thames. Oak was the only timber sufficiently waterproof for the 28-foot high lock gates, and the contractors encountered considerable difficulties in securing the necessary trunks.^[55]  It is unlikely that timber merchants were impressed by claims of oak trees with 60-foot trunks.  They would have known that any tree forced in such a way would have been too narrow at its extremity to produce a strong beam, while scars from its severed branches would have formed knots as the tree grew, making it very difficult to saw into planking. It should be noted that other trees, such as beech and elm, were capable of growing smooth, tall trunks – but the advertisement specified oak.

Where did the trees come from? The two Gidea Hall sales disposed of what may seem to have been a considerable quantity of timber. On offer were 1,050 ash trees, 710 elms, 480 oaks, 150 beech, 60 softwood trees and ten aspen – a paper total of 2,460 trunks which, allowing for some approximation – as was specified in the 1809 advertisement – we may regard as two and a half thousand trees, with a further four hundred to be pollarded by the purchasers. How as it possible for a five-hundred-acre estate to yield so much timber? How much money would such sales have realised? Was the property stripped of mature timber as a result? Timber trees were harvested from three sources: first, forests and woodland; second, hedgerows and third, parkland.  Each may be considered to assess its relevance to the resources of Gidea Hall.

[a] Forests and woodland The first category is only marginally relevant to Gidea Hall, but it can provide some useful contextual and local information. The first point to note is that the two terms, forests and woodland, are not strictly synonymous. In Norman times, forest was a legal concept, a set of rules covering a wide area of countryside used as royal hunting grounds – hence the connection between forests and deer. The medieval Forest of Essex covered much of the county, most of it long-settled and cultivated ground. Charles I attempted to enforce forest law in Essex – or, rather, to squeeze money out of landowners who, he claimed, had violated it by their very existence – and this largely explained why the county solidly backed Parliament in the Civil War. Cromwell's regime put an end to the medieval system and the remaining royal woodlands in Essex was renamed as Waltham Forest. Essentially, this constituted two well-timbered areas, which in time became known as Epping Forest and Hainault Forest. However, these terms still did not indicate that they had one-hundred-percent tree cover: in 1851, when most of Hainault Forest was brutally eradicated, there remained about 4,000 acres of unenclosed land, but only 2,900 acres were woodland.^[56] Clusters of trees were interspersed with tracts of open space, usually called "plains", which provided open grassland on which deer could graze, and space in which scattered trees could grow to the their full girth and height. A celebrated example in Hainault Forest was Fairlop Plain, which took its name from an enormous ancient oak tree, and became the location of an annual summer fair for Londoners.  Thames shipbuilders arrived in procession to salute the forest with giant model vessels mounted on wheels, each drawn by six horses. The giant oak owed its own name to responsible tree management practices: an untrustworthy legend claimed that Queen Anne had described it as "a Fair-lop". By the eighteenth century, it was in the last stage of a probable lifespan of five hundred years, its trunk having grown to a diameter of eleven feet. When a huge branch blew down in a storm – a hazard for geriatric oaks – it was hollowed out to provide a coffin large enough for an adult male.^[57]

In forest plains and open parkland, a small number of oaks could grow into massive and sprawling trees over many centuries, but in closely timbered woodland, oaks were more likely to form tall trunks so that their crowns ('tops') could compete with their neighbours for light. While oak timber was regarded as at its best during the mature phase of a tree's life, between 150 and 200 years, the absence of branches at lower levels meant that they could be usefully harvested from woodland at a much earlier stage. Studying an upmarket fourteenth-century building at Prittlewell in Essex, Rackham reckoned that a typical rafter oak had been felled at around fifty years of age, when its trunk had grown to nineteenth feet in length.^[58] In 1544, Parliament had decreed that, in coppiced woodland, "there shall be left standing and unfelled, for every Acre of Wood that shall be felled within the said Coppice, twelve Standils or Storers of Oak" – in other words, twelve trees in each acre should be encouraged to grow to full size, especially for the future use of the Navy.^[59] If this density had applied to the 2,900 acres of woodland at Hainault, it would point to 35,000 maturing oaks in the whole forest. Assuming an overlapping fifty-year life cycle for the medium-sized trees, it would be possible to fell 700 of the Prittlewell-sized rafter trees each year without depleting the overall timber stock. Since oak and hornbeam were the predominant species at Hainault, this might seem a reasonable estimate.

Unfortunately, the assumptions behind such a calculation were largely unfounded. The  Tudor law-makers themselves recognised that their insistence upon twelve oaks to the acre was over-optimistic, for they went on to provide that "if there be not so many Standils or Storers of Oak there, that then there shall be left so many of other Kind, that is to say, of Elm, Ash, Asp or Beech, as shall make up the said Number of twelve". In fact, the whole project was aspirational. The target was sometimes referred to, and occasionally written into leases of woodland as a condition of tenancy, but it was largely unenforceable.^[60] It proved impossible to police the exercise of lopping rights by communities adjoining Hainault and, indeed, little attempt was made to do so. Officially, locals were only permitted to cut branches and pollard tops, but whole trees could easily vanish, with the plea, if challenged, that they were "unthrifty", for instance, damaged by beetles and hence fit for the fireplace and not the workplace.^[61] Alongside this steady and half-hidden process of depredation, there were occasional bonanza bouts of felling for the Navy which ate into the Hainault timber stock. In his capacity as an official of the Navy Office, Samuel Pepys witnessed "many trees of the King's a-hewing" in "Waltham Forest". As he rode on to Ilford – where he enjoyed a good dinner – and continued to Barking, and "saw the place where they ship this timber to Woolwich", it seems very likely that the felling took place in Hainault Forest.^[62] This was the era of the Dutch Wars, and Pepys and his colleagues could be pardoned for putting national defence ahead of ecological sustainability. But the bonanzas continued.

One historian referred to "an epidemic of wood cutting between 1713 and 1723.^[63] Officials felled trees for housekeeping purposes: there were forest lodges to be maintained and salaries to be paid. In 1721, 1,245 trees were sold, and a further 2,075 followed in 1725. Since hornbeam, the other major Hainault species, was a challenge to carpenters (although its pollards were a prolific source of firewood), there can be little doubt that oak comprised the majority of the 3,300 trees felled for these two sales. The, in 1731, Lord Castlemaine was allowed to remove trees to the value of £1,000 for his personal use. Castlemaine was one of the titles acquired by Sir Richard Child as he climbed the peerage ladder. He was a neighbour of the two forests, having flaunted his astronomical wealth by building a gigantic mansion, Wanstead House, between 1715 and 1722. It is not entirely clear what he had done to earn such a slice of public resources, but in the jolly Georgian age of corruption, the connection between merit and reward was often tenuous. A supporter of Britain's first Prime Minister, the wheeler-dealer Sir Robert Walpole, his lordship held the largely honorific office of Lieutenant of Waltham Forest. This enabled him to claim that he was entitled to compensation for spending his own money on forest administration, but it is perhaps more likely that he sought high-quality timber for panelling at Wanstead House, and preferred that the taxpayer should cover the necessary costs.^[64] The proceeds of the two earlier sales, £605 in 1721 and £1,194 four years later, suggests that £1,000-worth of timber equalled nearly 2,000 trees. With five thousand trees removed in eight years, it seems likely that the larger oaks were being eradicated from Hainault Forest, and there was no policy of replanting.

Furthermore, these large-scale fellings for commercial sale took no account of the constant demands of the Navy. In the time of Pepys, Hainault timber had been hauled to Barking for despatch across the Thames to the royal dockyard at Woolwich. In 1766, the lower stretch of the River Roding, which flows into Barking Creek, was cleared by an entrepreneur who aimed to establish an inland coal distribution depot supplied by barges that could now reach Ilford. A government report on Hainault noted the advantage in 1793. "The Situation of the Forest, for Convenience and Cheapness of Carriage of Timber to the Dock Yards, is the most favourable of all His Majesty's Forests, being only Three Miles distant from Ilford Bridge, from whence the River Rodon [sic] is navigable to the Thames."^[65] There can be little doubt that Hainault's resources were drawn upon extensively during the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783, especially after 1778 when Britain faced the combined challenge of France and Spain. Renewal of war against France in 1793 probably explains the commissioning of the report assessing the remaining timber resources. The investigators counted 11,055 oak trees with trunks more than ten feet high, but of these only 2,760 reached thirty feet before their branches spread, making them "fit for the Use of the Navy". A further 7,825 were "young Trees, from Thirty Feet down to Ten Feet each"; the rest, nearly five hundred, were casualties of various kinds that made them useless. The Tudor target of twelves tall trees to the acre had totally collapsed. "On the whole, the Number of Oaks was less than Four Trees to the Acre, and of those of Thirty Feet and upwards, less than One to an Acre."^[66] The following year, the Navy collected 442 'loads' of felled oak from Hainault – a further 28 substandard loads were sold, as noted earlier. A load equalled fifty cubic feet, making the haul equal to about quarter of the thirty-footers counted twelve months earlier.^[67] This devastation was confirmed by a pamphleteer of 1818 who claimed that less than a quarter of the 2,700 trees regarded suitable for Naval use in the 1793 report were still "fit for that purpose", while "as to the 7,000 young trees, mentioned in the same Report, there are scarcely any of them that have not, as they attained a certain age, been converted into, and are now become, old pollards".^[68] The depletion of the Hainault resources helps explain why Britain faced a shortage of quality timber when Napoleon interrupted the Baltic supplies.  Certainly there is little sign that eighteenth-century Hainault Forest had ever come close to the Tudor target of twelve oaks to the acre.^[69]

SKETCH MAP 1: THE GIDEA HALL ESTATE   Distance from Hare Street to Gallows Corner: one mile

A: Pettits Farm – B: Plantation – C: Spoon Pond – D: Site of original Gidea Hall (c.1465-c.1720) – E: Gidea Hall (c. 1720-1930) – F: Fishponds (? + orchard) – G: 'Country park' (3 fields, included in the park on some but not all maps, mostly golf course post-1894) – H:  4.75 acres of woodland – I: 'Spring' or 'shaw' (screen of trees) – J: Roadside plantation (c.1776) – K: Gallows – L: Ornamental lake (extended north from millpond ?post-1730, later called Black's Canal and Raphael Park Lake) – M: Formal park (realigned from earlier park to the north and west of pre-1720 mansion) – N: ?former tannery pond – O: Hare Street hamlet – P: Hare Hall (post-1769). The avenues (marked as broken and dotted lines) are identified on Sketch Map 2. 

Since, at its closest point, Hainault Forest was within two miles of Gidea Hall, its exploitation in the decades prior to the 1808-9 sales has some relevance in helping us to understand their background. However, while the 500-acre estate had plenty of timber, it contained very few dense concentrations of trees, only one of them what Rackham termed 'ancient woodland', the rest being either groves or more recent formal plantations. However, there is evidence that the estate had always been well-wooded. It seems likely that, before it acquired its nickname, Giddy Hall, the estate was called Abenhatch, the hatch referring to a forest gate.^[70] The earliest field plan of Havering, surveyed in 1618, not only indicates (probably in a general sense) trees in "Giddy hall Parke", but also avenues and belts of woodland in the fields to the east that formed part of the estate.^[71] By the beginning of the nineteenth century, two fragments of the tree cover survived in the eastern fields, both on a roughly north-south access which suggests that they had survived clearance of the land into rectangular fields, probably in medieval times. Definitely identified by map-makers as a wood was a 4.75 acre wedge-shaped block of timber.^[72] Further to the east, and running parallel to the woodland, was a narrow corridor of trees which were sufficiently prominent to be indicated on the mid-Victorian six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map, but not dense enough to be designated as woodland. Such boundary belts, a feature of the Essex landscape, were known in the county as 'springs' or (more commonly in south Essex) as 'shaws'. Since they are almost entirely confined to major estates, it has been argued that their function was to provide refuges for foxes and game birds, in support of the gentry sports of hunting and shooting.^[73] If so, the production of timber was not the primary reason for its survival. By the time of the publication of the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map in 1896, the spring / shaw had been completely removed and incorporated into the adjoining field. These two patches of ancient woodland amounted to about seven acres.

It is likely that they owed their preservation to the strange anomaly that made Havering a county-within-a-county, traditionally termed a 'liberty' although nowadays it seems closer to a unitary authority. Havering had its own courts and hanged its own criminals. The gallows stood on common land close to the eastern tip of the Gidea Hall farmland, about a mile east of the mansion itself. Thumbnail sketches on maps indicate that it was a substantial structure, with two uprights and a crosspiece, oddly like a modern playground swing, and apparently sturdy enough to despatch two (or even three) offenders at a time. The last recorded execution, noted in Romford's parish registers, was of two unnamed women in 1656, possibly victims of the paranoid persecution of witchcraft. However, Havering's court records do not survive, and it is possible that there were subsequent hangings: the corpses of highwaymen were sometimes left to dangle and disintegrate as a deterrent. A new gallows was erected in 1744 and repairs were authorised in 1792, indicating that it continued to be intended for use throughout the eighteenth century. The structure was still standing when the common land was enclosed in 1815.^[74] The Essex landscape is notoriously flat and it is possible that the gallows, a mile away, might have been visible from the upper floors of the mansion. Even if it had become a quaint feature of the local heritage, the genteel occupants of Gidea Hall probably preferred to forget their proximity to a public strangling machine. Hence it is likely that both the patch and strip of natural woodland owed their survival to a desire to screen out an unwelcome neighbourhood feature.  If so, it is unlikely that their trees would have been intensively harvested in the 1808-9 sales.

The Gidea Hall estate also included three plantations, formal blocks or strips of trees located for specific purposes. There is something of a mystery about one of these, a two-and-a-half-acre L-shaped enclosure immediately north-east of the mansion, which skirted fish ponds that survive in 2026, well disguised within the Gidea Park garden suburb. Its proximity to the Big House suggests that it was either a decorative feature or perhaps an orchard. Of more importance was a five-acre narrow rectangular block of trees to the north-west of the mansion, alongside the stream that fed the ornamental lake. As discussed below, a 1638 print of the original Gidea Hall seems more reliable in its depiction of the building than its capture of the surrounding landscape, but it does indicate some tree cover in the gentle valley to the west of the mansion. It is likely that this was later reinforced by close planting to form a feature that remains part of the modern Raphael Park. It probably had two purposes, one to function as a windbreak and the other to block the view of the nearby Pettits  Farm.^[75] The third plantation is the most bizarre. It was a narrow strip of trees running eastward for nearly a mile from the hamlet of Hare Street on the north side of the London to Colchester highway as far as the common land at Gallows Corner, where a short 'hook' to the north once again masked the place of execution. One of the busiest roads in England, the main highway through Essex carried not only coaches and waggons, but endless herds of livestock, as well as flocks of geese and – in December – of turkeys, all of which could only reach the capital by walking (or waddling). In dry weather, the traffic raised "a mighty cloud of dust". Congestion was frequent, and cattle drovers in particular were notorious for their bad language.^[76] The screen was presumably intended to provide the estate with some privacy, and perhaps also intended as a barrier to prevent trespassing. Yet it is puzzling that its main stretch ran to the east of Hare Street, away from Gidea Hall itself, although there seems to have been an attempt to thicken tree cover at the roadside immediately in front of the mansion as well. It should also be noted that the feature does not appear in the Chapman and André atlas of 1777, which was surveyed between 1772 and 1774. This is not conclusive evidence that it did not exist then for the two surveyors were not punctilious in recording timber: for instance, the 4.75-acre kite-shaped woodland already discussed appears as a square on their map. But Chapman and André did pay attention to identifying features along major highways – their project was essentially a road atlas – and it is unlikely that they would have ignored a mile-long belt of trees alongside so important a highway. A notre attached to the Humphry Repton print of 1787, illustrated below, confirms its recent origin: Gidea Hall was described as "a well-known object from the turnpike road; from whence, however, some judicious plantations now begin to conceal it".

This prompts an alternative explanation for the roadside belt, one that particularly accounts for its location east of Hare Street. In 1768-9, an ancient farmhouse called Goodwins was demolished and replace by a small country house with the made-up name Hare Hall. Goodwins stood about a mile from Gidea Hall, on the opposite side of the road. Hare Hall represented an announcement by a wealthy stone-mason, J.A. Wallinger, that he was using his money to force his way into County Society. The architect James Paine was constructing the mighty Palladian mansion of Thorndon Hall at the time, and Wallinger hired him to produce a miniaturised version. Its parvenu creator proclaimed his trade by facing Hare Hall with Portland stone. The imposing apartments of English country houses usually faced south, so that the owners could benefit from the light and (sometimes) the warmth of the sun, but Hare Hall was oriented to the north, across an impromptu park, so that it could be seen, indeed could not be avoided, by anyone travelling along the highway. The belt of roadside trees, probably planted by Richard Benyon II around 1776, was probably not designed to block the view of the interloper's architectural self-advertisement from Gidea Hall itself, since parkland trees and the buildings of Hare Street would have obstructed any direct line of sight. But, as they matured, the trees would amiably impede the prospect from the upstart's north-facing windows. 

Remarkably, this third plantation, although only a few yards deep at the roadside, covered seven acres. As it was probably not much more than thirty years old in 1808, it might not have yielded much marketable timber, all the more so because its role was primarily as a screen. In 2026, a short stretch survives alongside the Gidea Park Sports Ground, at the Gallows Corner end of the highway, now the A118.^[77]

In summary, something like 22 acres of the Gidea Hall estate consisted of woodland in 1808-9, two-thirds of it plantations and probably relatively recent, one-third surviving natural (or 'ancient') timber. Even the application of the 1793 Hainault ratio of four oaks to an acre would account for fewer than ten percent of the 480 oaks offered at the two sales. Since their role of the five patches of trees was mainly to screen intrusive neighbours – the gallows, Pettits Farm, Hare Hall and the highway traffic – it is unlikely that they were intensively culled for the two auctions. We must look elsewhere for the bulk of the two-and-a-half thousand trunks and tops that were marketed at that time.

[b] Hedgerows Even a small farm could contain several miles of hedgerows.^[78] A modern survey of a 1,971-acre estate at Bocking measured no less than twenty-four and a half miles of them, three-quarters definitely dating from before 1600. Perhaps Gidea Hall's five-hundred acres might not have totalled the full quarter of that figure, six miles, since internal divisions would have been eradicated in the formal park – although not in the less manicured three fields of the 'country' park extension, which retained their hedges.^[79] The external boundaries of any property had to be particularly secure. In 1321, a long-running dispute between Hornchurch Priory and the owner of the Gidea Hall estate was settled with a binding agreement that he should renew the hedge and ditch that separated his property from the farm the brethren owned at Risebridge, to the north.^[80] The need to prevent animals from straying – the key issue in the 1321 dispute – is one of the reasons why hedgerows were more densely lined with trees than modern farmers would tolerate.^[81] Probably more important in accounting for their profusion in earlier times was the prevalent custom that permitted tenants to take pollards as firewood, while reserving the trunks and bollings to the landowner.

As a Victorian tree expert explained, oak trees luxuriated in hedgerows: "the branches generally occurring lower down, and meeting with no obstacle to their development, they assume every variety of curve, and produce timber which is especially valuable for naval purposes. Timber thus grown is of the hardest and most compact kind", although in exposed locations it was subject to wind damage which could break off branches, while the demand for firewood could also cause "injudicious lopping or pruning". Three centuries earlier, William Harrison, an observer of Essex life, had agreed about the quality of oak timber from the hedgerows. "Of all oak growing in England, the park oak is the softest and far more spalt and brickle [splintered and brittle] than the hedge oak."^[82]

It seems that everyone was a winner when oak trees flourished on field boundaries, providing fuel for their peasants, acorns for their pigs and weirdly bent branches for the shipwright. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the Gidea Hall farmland could have accounted for the 480 trees auctioned in 1808-9. A timber census at Roxwell, near Chelmsford, in 1734 counted 4,061 trees on 603 acres. More than half of them, 2,218 in all, were elms, with oaks accounting for the much smaller number of 846 trees. Ash (590) and maple (367) made up most of the rest. Indeed, these figures should cause no surprise, since it was a commonplace that elm dominated the Essex landscape, which was badly affected by the ravages of disease from the nineteen-sixties. However, what is striking is the extent to which the Roxwell tree stock was exploited through pollarding: five-sixth of the elm, oak and maple was harvested in that way, and two-thirds of the ash.^[83] Only 370 elms and 131 oaks were "maidens", another term for standards left to grow to their natural height.^[84] The Gidea Hall estate was about five-sixths of the size of the Roxwell property, but some allowance should be made for the fact that internal boundaries would have been eliminated from the formal parkland. If the same density of tree cover applied to an area three-quarters of Roxwell, there would have been 277 elms and 98 oaks that had escaped the pruning axe – and some of these would have been too young to be worth felling.^[85] With the estate's woodland too small – and some of it too recently planted – to have produced many oaks in 1808-9, these two sources can barely account for one hundred trees. Obviously we must look to the parkland as the source of most of the oaks sold at the two auctions.

A glimpse of hedgerows on the Gidea Hall estate, 1911

[c, i] Parkland: location and landscape It is not always easy to establish precise dates for the construction of a prominent mansion, and information about the surrounding parkland can be even harder to pin down. The Gidea Hall story began in the mid-1460s, when Sir Thomas Coke (or Cooke – the family were flexible about the spelling) secured royal permission to build a castle-style residence, turreted and moated, and to enclose a two-hundred acre park.^[86] The park was presumably functioning by 1467, when Coke became a victim of Lancastrian faction fighting and was briefly imprisoned, for his enemies pillaged his property, removing his deer among their booty. This was a dramatic beginning, but the truth is that the first two centuries of the park's history were largely irrelevant to any assessment of its resources in 1808-9. First, as the 1618 field plan made clear, "Giddy hall Parke" was mainly to the north and west of the mansion, probably located here to avoid intrusive industrial activity, such as tanning and milling, along the highway. It was later reoriented with an emphasis upon land to the south and east, while western section, across the small brook, was abandoned when the millpond that it fed was extended to form an ornamental lake, probably in the early eighteenth century.^[87] Second, it is likely that, by the mid-seventeenth century, few large timber trees remained anywhere on the 500-acre estate. "By the Elizabethan period, few of Havering's holdings, even in the northern part of the manor [where woodland was more common], still had good stands of trees."^[88] However, the Gidea Hall resources were almost certainly depleted by more insistent imperatives than the general pressure of demand for fuel and building materials. When the statesman and scholar Sir Anthony Cooke died in 1576, he left a prosperous estate supplemented by a large property portfolio, but for the next ninety years his descendants mismanaged their finances and sometimes teetered on the brink of ruin. Sir Anthony's grandson and namesake, who inherited in 1579, sought to cut a dash as a courtier with such extravagance that he served time in a debtor's prison. His son, Charles, sold off the peripheral properties to keep his head above water. At his death, Gidea Hall passed to a son-in-law, Sir Edward Sydenham, whose support for Charles I in the Civil War resulted in the sequestration (penalty seizure) of the estate. The Sydenhams recovered Gidea Hall by paying a punitive fine,^[89] but were compelled to sell the estate in 1658, drawing a line under the Cooke dynasty after two hundred years.^[90] Given the property sales and the constant financial pressures, it is reasonably certain that the estate would have stripped of mature trees, since marketable timber was the one of the easiest assets to realise.

In 1638, the mansion received an unexpected overnight visit from Marie de Medici, the Queen Mother of France. A French artist commemorated the event in a print that gives the only known picture of the Cooke's home. The rendering of the mansion, in a bird's-eye view from the south, may be assumed to be accurate, but the depiction of the surrounding landscape is probably fanciful. The slight valley of the stream to the west of the house, which would later become the artificial lake, is shown as well timbered, but it is noteworthy that the trees in the rest of the grounds are small. Most puzzling is a wide approach road – it can hardly be called an avenue – which heads north and terminates in a distant gate arch. There is no trace of any such track on subsequent maps and it makes no sense, since there was no highway along the northern perimeter of the estate with which it might connect. It may be that the artist was depicting an access route from the main highway which ran south of the mansion, and chose to move it into the background of the print's perspective. If so – that is to say, if there was such an access road but in another part of the estate – then it is probably worth noting that the flanking trees are very small.^[91]

A detail from the 1638 print of the old Gidea Hall. If the depiction of the parkland was accurate, it would confirm that decades of financial pressure had led the Cooke family to strip the grounds of tall timber, leaving only small trees. However, the picture may be fanciful, as there is no evidence that there was ever an access road north of the mansion. If it did exist, it is just possible that it was excavated to form the Spoon Pond when the original moat was filled in c. 1720. But this can only be a speculation (or wild guess).  

The second phase of the history of Gidea Hall parkland probably began in 1664, with the sale of the mansion to the Burch family, planters and slave-owners from Barbados. Burch died four years later, leaving to his widow "the parke knowne by the name of Guydie hall parke, with the warren and game of Coneyes therein called Guydie hall warren".^[92]

The reference to the rabbits in a protected warren suggest that the 1465/6 park still existed, although, as argued below, it is likely that the Burch family began the process of reorienting the formal grounds to the south and east. Following the death of Burch's great-nephew, Thomas Hothersall, the property was acquired by Sir John Eyles, probably in 1710.^[93] Philip Morant, the county historian, noted that this prominent City alderman used his mercantile wealth to begin a new chapter in the history of the estate. "Sir John Eyles rebuilt this House in an elegant manner, and with plantations of trees, canals, and other improvements, rendered it one of the most compleat [sic] Seats in this County."^[94] A year after the death of Eyles in 1744, Gidea Hall was purchased by Richard Benyon, who had made his money in India, where he had been Governor of the British trading post of Fort St George, the nucleus of the city of Madras.^[95]  He was succeeded in 1774 by his son, the second Richard Benyon, who called in a landscape designer, Richard Woods, to make further improvements to the mansion and the park.^[96] His son, the third Richard Benyon, who succeeded in 1794, evidently preferred to live in Berkshire: the estate was on the market from 1797, and was purchased by Alexander Black five years later. Thus we may tentatively conclude that the Gidea Hall park was reoriented to the south and east either during the half-century ownership of the Burch family, whose West Indian plantations gave them plenty of cash, or around the time when Sir John Eyles rebuilt the mansion, which was probably in the seventeen-twenties. (Eyles chose a site slightly to the south of the previous house, which may explain why changes were made in the location of the park.)  Further alterations were made by Richard Benyon II and his landscape designed Richard Woods around 1776. Tree-planting would certainly have featured in the creation of new parkscape, meaning that the available timber in 1808-9 would have been about 140 years old (Burch) or seventy years old (Eyles), with the trees from the Benyon II / Woods redesign having only three decades of growth which would have made them barely worth marketing.

These contemporary shreds and retrospective speculations can be supplemented by evidence from two important maps, the first by Chapman and André, which gave a picture of the estate between 1772 and 1774, and the second the six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey which was surveyed between 1862 and 1871. First, we should note that the Gidea Hall grounds were not all parkland. There would certainly have been extensive formal gardens: the six-inch-to-the-mile map marks a nursery. In addition, there was some attempt to make the estate self-sufficient. In 1793, the kitchen gardens were entrusted to a horticulturalist with the splendid name of Solomon Stubbing, probably part of the Benyon family's retreat from their Essex property. There was probably an orchard, planted close to the house to discourage theft, but its apple trees would have been too insignificant to interest timber merchants.^[97] There were also fishponds covering one and a half acres, although whether they were for food or sport it is impossible to say.^[98] The two "canals" attributed by Morant to the landscaping of Sir John Eyles covered seven acres. Itbwas probably Eyles who took the pond that had powered the long-vanished watermill at the main road and extended it in a sinuous continuation to the north, forming the sheet of water now known as Raphael Park Lake. 'Water features' – as we should call them – were popular at the time: Lord Petre gave a millpond at Thorndon Park a similar make-over in 1733, while the ornamental lakes at Weald Park (South Weald) were planned in 1738.^[99] The lake may have been enlarged by Richard Benyon II around 1776, when James Wyatt was employed to create an elegant bridge which still carries the main road over the dam. Eyles was also probably the creator of an ornamental feature to the north of the mansion, a long, narrow stretch of water that could indeed be called a 'canal'. At some point, again probably in the time of Richard Benyon II, a circular basin was added at the far end, creating a  thermometer-like shape that gave it the name Spoon Pond. Perhaps the aim was to bring a touch of Versailles to Romford, but it is more likely that it was intended for the more prosaic purpose of drainage. The Cooke family mansion had been defended by a moat: at least part of it can be seen in the 1638 print. When the old mansion was demolished, the moat was filled in, and the Spoon Pond was perhaps designed to collect surface water.^[100]

The reorientation of the park to the south and east of the mansion created both opportunities and challenges, especially in relation to tree-planting. Morant's use of the term "plantations" did not simply refer to the creation of miniature areas of woodland: as argued above, the roadside strip east of Hare Street was almost certainly the work of Richard Benyon II, probably recommended by his landscape expert, Richard Woods. The incorporation into the formal park of the former Stone Field, between the mansion and the highway, required dense planting, to provide shelter and shade while also screening the main road traffic. We are fortunate in having a picture of this part of the grounds published in 1787, and even luckier that it was the work of Humphry Repton, who lived at nearby Hare Street. Repton was about to embark on a career as a landscape designer, and we can be confident that he took care to represent the Gidea Hall trees accurately. The roadside grove to the left of the picture appears to consist mainly of beech, with the lower horizontal branches removed, while other evidence suggests that the trees further away to the right were mostly elm. A photograph taken in 1911 confirms the beech / elm identification: the fact that most of the beeches were still standing, a century and a quarter later, is in itself useful in establishing the planting date, since they are regarded as "chronologically ancient" at two hundred years of age.^[101] We can thus conclude that the parkland south of the mansion was probably established around 1720, and attribute the beech grove to Sir John Eyles. It is likely that, by 1808, these trees had reached a state of maturity that justified thinning them, thereby producing many of the 150 beeches sold at the first auction. 

Humphry Repton's view of the Gidea Hall grounds, 1787. The trees to the left, screening the park from the highway, seem to have been mostly beech. The trees to the right of the mansion (Avenue [a] on Sketch Map 2) were elm. If planted c. 1720, they were approaching maturity but still not full-sized. Repton's viewpoint was close to the southern end of the modern Heath Drive. Cattle, used as lawn-mowers, were also a threat to the regrowth of coppiced trees. Image by courtesy of Havering Libraries Local Studies. 

A 1911 photograph from roughly the same vantage point shows beech to the left and mature elm to the right.  Image by courtesy of Havering Libraries Local Studies.  

[c, ii] Parkland: the avenues In addition to the semi-formal clump planting to the south of the house, there were three avenues to the east, plus a fourth to the west of the ornamental lake. It is very likely that these were a major source of the timber sold in 1808-9. The ages of the avenues would obviously offer a clue to the maturity, and hence the availability, of the trees, but planting dates do not seem to have been recorded. One possible clue lies in changing fashions in the design of country-house parks.  The seventeenth century liked formal features, but the eighteenth century rebelled against this devotion to geometrical patterns: by the seventeen-thirties, landowners were seeking fake 'natural' landscapes, a technique central to the work of 'Capability' Brown and Repton himself.^[102]

SKETCH MAP 2: THE AVENUES

Broken lines indicate the four main avenues in the Gidea Hall parkland around the time of the timber auctions of 1808 and 1809. Dotted lines mark sections that had disappeared by the eighteen-seventies. The key to unravelling the puzzling pattern of the avenues is the fact that the mansion erected c. 1720 was built on a site slightly to the south of the original Gidea Hall. Thus it is almost certain that Avenue [a] was planted at that time, as a decorative adjunct to the new house: its elms were nearly a century old at the time of the auctions. There were older trees in Avenues [b] and [c], which were oriented towards the earlier Gidea Hall, and possibly planted in the 1660s. Avenue [d], west of the brook, presumably indicated an earlier grand entrance from Pettits Lane (crossing the modern Lake Rise at right angles). It would have fallen out of use in the eighteenth century when the northward extension of the former watermill pond to form an ornamental lake obstructed access to the mansion. In the vanished stretches, trees would not simply have been felled, but their roots stubbed up to prevent regrowth. The long central break in Avenue [a] suggests a desire to return the large field close to Hare Street to arable, which required the removal of tree roots. This may point to fellings in 1808-9 when the price of domestic farm produce was high. Avenue [c] was not marked on the Chapman and André atlas of 1777, probably because it was not visible from the highway. Chapman and André also indicated extensive tree cover, in clumps and groves, between the mansion and the highway. 

As indicated on Sketch Map 2, the inter-relationships in the pattern of the Gidea Hall avenues are puzzling. The avenue marked [a] is the one that makes most sense, since it continues the line of the mansion built by Sir John Eyles to the east-north-east: the mansion, although broadly south-facing, was not perfectly aligned west-to-east since it was built parallel to the highway. We also know, from the subsequent development of the Gidea Park garden suburb, that it was an avenue of elms. (There was also, somewhere close to the mansion, a much shorter lime alley, perhaps the source of the sixty softwood trees offered for sale in 1809.) Avenue [a] crossed a short section of the formal park before extending through the three fields of the county park, its straight line ignoring their hedgerow boundaries. A short distance to the north, another avenue, marked [b], ran parallel for roughly the same length, about half a mile. From this, a third avenue, marked [c], headed off [b] to the north. None of these three avenues connected with any access point or external roadway, indicating that they were primarily intended for the enhancement of the parkland and the recreation of the gentlefolk who resided at the Hall.^[103]

At first sight, it is difficult to understanding why two avenues [a] and [b], would have been planted so close together. The explanation appears to be that the two Gidea Halls, the Cooke mansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and its Eyles successor of early Georgian times, were built on slightly different sites. The key to their respective locations is the stable block, which stood to the east of both buildings. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments noted that it had been remodelled at some point, but the reconstruction incorporated the original structure, "probably of an early sixteenth century date", and stood on the same site.^[104] The 1638 print shows the stables to the south-east of the original mansion, later maps show them to the north-east of its replacement. In other words, Sir John Eyles, not wishing to become homeless during the lengthy process of erection of his new residence, chose to build it slightly to the south. "Brick foundations are said to have been found at the back of the house," the Royal Commission commented in 1921. These almost certainly represented traces of the earlier Gidea Hall. Not only did avenue [b] point to its site, but so did another mysterious double belt of trees to the west of the lake, marked as [d] on the sketch map. This seems to have indicated a broad approach to the earlier mansion from the side road now called Pettits Lane. It would have gone out of use when blocked by the ornamental lake, and was superseded as a formal entrance by the carriageway that approached the house direct from the highway, curved to provide access from both west and east as shown on the Repton print.

Thus the apparent mystery of two parallel avenues so close together is explained by the fact that the Gidea Hall built around 1720 stood slightly to the south of its predecessor. Trees were planted so that the windows at the eastern end of each building looked along a shaded avenue stretching into the middle distance. Avenues [b] and [c] were perhaps planted by the Burch family after they acquired the property in 1664, given that the Cookes had probably denuded the estate of timber and more recent owners seem to have been transient speculators. Avenue [a] followed probably in the seventeen-twenties, to provide the same sheltered vista for the new mansion. Later in the nineteenth century, there is evidence of elms at Wanstead Park that were 160 years old, and oaks in Epping Forest that had stood for between 150 and 200 years.^[105] Given that the oaks offered for sale in 1809 were described as having trunks over twenty feet in length, and that the elms were "chiefly large", it is likely that many of them came from the seventeenth-century avenues [b] to [d]. Obviously, there was a long gap between two maps cited here, one surveyed in the seventeen-seventies, and the other ninety years later. But it is likely that the central section of the 1720 planting, avenue [a], was targeted in 1808-9, since trees in the large field adjoining the hamlet of Hare Street were not only felled but apparently also uprooted. Agricultural prices, especially for grain, were high during the French wars, and Alexander Black would no doubt have been tempted to return part of the 'country park' to arable. After 1815, market incentives to place more land under the plough were lacking.

A view of the Gidea Hall 'country park' in 1911. Its conversion to a golf course in 1894 had probably involved the removal of some trees, but impressive elms remain. The tree in the left foregound had been pollarded, but the harvesting cycle had been abandoned, leaving its sprouted limbs to grow into a mysterious shape.  

A short surviving stretch of the elm avenue in 1911, the west end of Avenue [a] on Sketch Map 2. If they were from the original planting, the elms would have been almost two centuries old, and fully mature.

The 1808-9 auctions reviewed It is thus possible to hazard some reasonably informed guesses about the provenance of the trees sold from the Gidea Hall estate in 1808-9. It is unlikely that hedgerows and woodland could have supplied more than 100 mature oaks, which indicates that most of the 480 trees auctioned came from parkland, possibly from the seventeenth-century avenues: the former grand access from Pettits Lane, long since obstructed by the lake, may have been one easily expendable source. If we assume that the Gidea Hall hedgerows contained the same mixture of species as was reported from the Roxwell estate in 1734, it is unlikely that the field boundaries would have yielded much more than half the 710 elm trees sold in 1808-9, and the small enclaves of woodland would have added very little. Hence we may conclude that, here, too, the axe mainly targeted parkland trees, with the specific aim of removing the central section of the 1720 avenue. The 150 beech trees also came from the parkland, since beech was not a common hedgerow tree. Many of them would have been the product of the thinning of the grove south of the mansion that screened it from the highway.

One striking feature of the sales is the very large number of ash trees – 900 felled for the first auction, with a further 150 available on a buyer-to-collect basis in the second. Unlike oak and elm, ash is not a major construction timber, but it is useful for ancillary purposes, for instance making strong floorboards and unbreakable cart wheels: its principal use was in the construction of furniture. Although ash can live for two- to three-hundred years, its major advantage is that it reaches maturity after a couple of decades – and can show signs of ageing after a century. The rapid growth of ash would have made it attractive to a landowner creating new parkland. As one of Anthony Trollope's characters remarked: "A new man may buy a forest; but he can't get park trees."^[106] Oaks and elms grow slowly through the sapling stage, but ash look like mature trees after twenty years. Applying the Roxwell ratio, it would seem unlikely that the Gidea Hall hedgerows would have supplied more than 150 of the trees sold. If Richard Benyon II had used fast-growing ash to establish the desired privacy screen east of Hare Street in the  seventeen-seventies, then thirty years later, the roadside plantation towards Gallows Corner could have been a contributory source. Even so, it is likely that the formal park made a substantial contribution. If, as seems likely, Sir John Eyles invested heavily in ash around 1720 to soften the rectangular solidity of his new mansion, these trees would have been approaching ninety years of age in 1808-9, in the optimum phase for their use as timber.

Omissions from the sale should also be noted. One of the few downsides of ash as an ornamental tree is that it is late to come to life in spring and one of the first species to shed its leaves in autumn. Parkland would almost certainly have also featured fast-growing and elegant birch, with its much longer summer season. Birch timber has various specialist uses, but the evident focus of the two Gidea Hall auctions in 1808-9 on the construction market probably explains why none were offered for sale. (Birch also burns hot, and a large mansion with many fireplaces could easily have consumed whatever the estate produced.) By the twentieth century, and almost certainly much earlier, a lime alley was one of the features of Gidea Hall. Grinling Gibbons carved in limewood, and perhaps the alley yielded some of the sixty softwood trees felled in 1808. Despite the value of hornbeam in providing firewood when pollarded, it is curious that the species is not mentioned in the sales: perhaps it never flourished at Gidea Hall.

Magic money trees? I have traced no record of the prices paid at the two auctions, but it is reasonable to assume that the two sales of Gidea Hall timber were extremely profitable. Not long before, Lord Petre had sold thirteen oaks from Thorndon Park for £600. These were giants, each one equal to a load of timber, fifty cubic feet, and selling at £46 a load. The 1794 Hainault Forest sale was of smaller oaks, rejected for Navy use, and the price per load was much lower, at just under £19 a load.^[107] The operative price for the Gidea Hall sales would have been somewhere between the two: good timber was scarce, prices had risen, but the oaks were probably medium-sized, and ash, beech and elm were less valuable. If we assume that the 2,400 hardwood trees constituted 600 loads – their trunks averaging 12.5 cubic feet – an auction price of £25 a load would have left Alexander Black £15,000 better off. Adjusted for inflation, the equivalent sum in 2026 would be over one million pounds.^[108]

Gidea Hall in 1818. The parkscape had apparently survived the surgery of the two auctions – but perhaps the print was based on a pre-1808 sketch?  

The long-term impact This slaughter of fine timber probably had less impact upon the Gidea Hall landscape than we might fear.^[109] A print of 1818 which shows a well-wooded parkland may not be entirely reliable: it could date from a decade earlier. The picture shows no felled stumps and its arcadian depiction of a stile and winding footpath seem fanciful. But even if the Gidea Hall trees had suffered a severe surgical assault in 1808-9, they recovered over the decades. In 1848, White's Directory of Essex referred to "a well wooded park", a phrase echoed by a county historian in 1861. A 1906 guidebook identified Gidea Hall by its "wealth of trees shading the park".^[110] When the Gidea Park garden suburb was laid out in 1910-11, one of its marketing themes was "everywhere there are trees". One prominent street, Broadway, "follows the ancient avenue running eastward from Gidea Hall", with a side turning called Elm Walk. If the elms here were the original early-eighteenth-century planting, they would have been fully mature and possibly not destined for long-term survival. The garden suburb, squeezed into a narrow south-north corridor between Raphael Park and the golf course, was intended as the first instalment of a larger project, with further housing to be built beyond the golf links. The two entries for this second phase, which never materialised, both used the surviving eastern section of this avenue (marked [a] on Sketch Map 2) as the axis of a civic centre.^[111] The garden suburb project, of course, followed a full century after the two timber sales under discussion here, but the publicists' emphasis upon the woodland context of the new housing scheme does indicate that the large-scale fellings of Napoleonic times did not permanently affect either the landscape of the park or the sylvan appearance of the adjoining hedgerows.

The winning entry in the 1911 competition to design a second phase of the Gidea Park garden suburb, to be built to the east of the golf course. The civic centre (in thick black shading) was to be based on the surviving eastern end of the avenue planted to provide a vista and walkway from the new Gidea Hall c. 1720 (Avenue [a] on Sketch Map 2). Note the roadside plantation alongside the highway from Hare Street to Gallows Corner (at the bottom right / south-east of the map), a survival from landscaping c. 1776 (marked J on Sketch Map 1). The eastward extension was never built. Some of the ground was incorporated into an extension of the golf course, and the south-east corner became the Gidea Park Sports Ground. 

"... everywhere there are trees". The survival of parkland giants was one of the selling points of the Gidea Park garden suburb when it was launched in 1911. Tree-moving equipment was used to reposition some of the smaller examples. 

This commentary in the two Gidea Hall timber auctions in 1808-9 has ranged widely although I fear that my attempts at analysis are not notably profound. I hope that this exploration may encourage others to go further into the subject and with greater authority.   

Other material in martinalia deals with the early history of Gidea Park. "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park" seeks to explain why almost 30 years passed from the first proposal to develop housing on the Gidea Hall estate before the Garden Suburb project was launched in 1909-11: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/420-origins-of-gidea-park.
"The idealised homes of Gidea Park: some images from the 1911 Exhibition" supplements "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park" (above) and discusses some of the architect-designed houses erected in 1910-11: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/419-gidea-images.
"Gidea Park: a suburb and its syllables" explores the process by which 'Giddy Hall', the name of Romford's premier mansion for 650 years, was transmuted into the trisyllabic 'Gidea Park' when the estate was developed for housing in 1910-11: https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/428-gidea-syllables.

ENDNOTES 

^[1] Victoria County History of Essex, vii (1978), 67-9. The earlier mansion, completed c. 1568 but designed in the 15^th century, was described in 1723 (shortly before its demolition) as "an old House … call'd Giddy-Hall, being a great square Building, resembling a Jesuit's College". The comparison was to the Jesuit institution at Douai in France, which was similarly turreted. J. Macky, A Journey through England… (London, 1723), 18-19. I know of no evidence to support the date for the new mansion of 1718 baldly stated in Royal Commission on Historical Monuments… Essex, ii London, 1921), 203.  The name was pronounced as two syllables, probably deriving from a medieval nickname, Giddy Hall – perhaps an allusion to its unusual size. The modern derived name 'Gidea Park' became trisyllabic. The 16^th-century house was illustrated in a print of 1638, which is reproduced in Ged Martin, "Gidea Park: a suburb and its syllables": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/428-gidea-syllables.

^[2] A composite map from Chapman and André's Atlas may be consulted via https://map-of-essex.uk/map_of_essex_v3/. The western side of the landscaped grounds of Gidea Hall, including the ornamental lake, became Romford's public amenity, Raphael Park, in 1904. The rest was developed from 1909 as a garden suburb under the invented name 'Gidea Park'. Ged Martin, "Romford's Garden Suburb: the origins of Gidea Park": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/420-origins-of-gidea-park.

^[3] At various time, other properties were included in an agricultural conglomerate, e.g. in 1846, the full portfolio was 741 acres, but this probably included nearby farms that were not necessarily contiguous. The 500-acre block of park and farmland stretched along the north side of the main Essex road from Pettits Lane as far as Gallows Corner.

^[4] E.W. Brayley and John Britton, A Topographical and Historical Description of the County of Essex ... (London, 1803), 476.

^[5] Andy Grant's heritage article in Romford Recorder, 28 March 2025 may be viewed at https://gpadcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/4-Gidea-Hall-and-park-undergo-major-changes.pdf. 

^[6] In 1833, a pack of staghounds chased a deer into Gidea Hall and cornered it in one of the mansion's bedrooms, "much to the annoyance of Mr Black, the owner". R.F. Ball and T. Gilbey, The Essex Foxhounds…   (London, 1896), 324.

^[7] A classic work, R.G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power… (Cambridge, Mass,, 1926) 316-45 remains a useful overview of the economic warfare between Britain and France. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? … (Oxford, 2006), 211-14, gives a fast-moving account of the economic warfare between Britain and France, but does not mention timber.

^[8] The "English" oak (Quercus robur) is pedunculate variety. A similar sub-species, the sessile oak, is less common in Essex. According to Wikipedia, there are two venerable pedunculate oaks in Romford's Raphael Park, which was carved out of the Gidea Hall estate. I have found no further information about them. Most reference sources specify that sessile oaks predominate in the west of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Curiously, they were also the predominant species in the woodlands of south-east Essex.

^[9] The figure of 6,000 oak trees for HMS Victory is widely cited (e.g. by R. Cavendish in History Today, lix, 7 July 2009), but I have not traced the source. At the time of writing (2026), Victory is undergoing a major conservation project, the first since 1890. Some timbers are believed to date from the original 18^th-century construction.

^[10] O. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (London, 1976), 99-102.

^[11] Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 337-8.

^[12] Albion, Forests and Sea Power, 348-57.

^[13] Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 102.

^[14] When Spain joined France in declaring war against Britain in 1796, Jervis was forced to withdraw the Mediterranean fleet to Lisbon. His priority now was to prevent the junction of the Spanish and French navies, which would enable the enemy to dominate the Atlantic and even invade Britain itself.  In February 1797, he received news that the Spanish fleet had sailed from its Mediterranean base at Cartagena and had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, with the evident intention of heading for the French naval base at Brest in Brittany. On St Valentine's Day, taking advantage of thick fog, he ambushed the unprepared Spanish fleet off the south-western point of Portugal, Cape St Vincent. Although Jervis commanded only fifteen ships against their twenty-seven, he boldly plunged them in line ahead through the disorganised enemy. This enabled his ships to fire from both port and starboard, whereas the Spanish vessels could only respond with half their guns – and, not being at battle stations, many of them failed to mobilise their full firepower. However, the disadvantage of the admiral's plan was that, since the two navies were sailing in different directions, their engagement would be very brief.  With split-second improvisation, his brilliant second-in-command, Horatio Nelson, took his ship out of line and blocked the enemy from escaping. Four Spanish ships were captured and the rest, badly mauled, withdrew to Cadiz, where Jervis blockaded them. Although Nelson's move had represented a highly creative interpretation of his battle orders, Jervis generously recognised that his younger colleague had won the battle and prevented the junction of the two hostile navies.

^[15] Documents printed in J.S. Tucker's 1844 biography show that St Vincent conducted much naval business from Rochetts during his term of office. His occasional later contributions to House of Lords debates included opposition to the abolition of the slave trade, a stance that somewhat dents his status as a national hero.

^[16] J.S. Tucker, Memoirs of Admiral the Right Hon[ourabl]e the Earl of St Vincent… (2 vols, London, 1844), ii, 163. Admiral Collingwood, Nelson's second-in-command at Trafalgar, focused more on securing future supplies. "What I am most anxious about, is the plantation of oak in the country. We shall never cease to be a great people while we have ships, which we cannot have without timber". Collingwood complained that short-term horizons prevented people from planting oak trees. "I plant an oak whenever I have a place to put it in, and have some very nice plantations coming on; and not only that, but I have a nursery in my garden, from which I give trees to any gentleman who will plant them, and instruction how to top them at a certain age, to make them spread to knee timber [i.e. to shape the branches into natural joists]." G.L. Newnham Collingwood, A Selection from the Public and Private Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Lord Collingwood… (2 vols, London, 1828), ii, 7, a letter written on board HMS Ocean blockading Cadiz in February 1807.

^[17] Local traditions surrounding Lord St Vincent were collected by a later vicar, Canon Duncan Fraser, and printed in an undated book South Weald… (?1895), which unfortunately lacked page numbers. Unfortunately, most of Rochetts was destroyed by fire in 1975.

^[18] https://gpadcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/4-Gidea-Hall-and-park-undergo-major-changes.pdf.

^[19] Various estimates are quoted in B.R. Mitchell with P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), 5.

^[20] Extensive ancient woodland had survived in south-east Essex – the area that Rackham variously termed the Rayleigh Hills and the Rochford Peninsula. He estimates that, in the decade after 1805, 650 acres (about one square mile) was cleared of trees to become farmland – often of indifferent quality. O. Rackham, The Woods of South-East Essex … (Rochford, 2006), 25.

^[21] For instance, the 1618 field plan of Havering shows a small woodland close to the location of the modern Gidea Park station. It does not appear on later maps, and may have been removed to provide timber for the construction of Hare Hall in 1768-9.

^[22] Decennial census–taking began in 1801, but the earliest trawls are not totally reliable. In addition, since the capital (Cobbett's 'Great Wen') steadily expanded to gobble up surrounding communities, the limits of the conurbation were not clear: modern historians quote 1801 London population figures from 950,000 to 1.1 million. Abstract of British Historical Statistics, 20, treated the later County of London (1888) as the metropolitan area, calculating 1.088 million in 1801 and 1.259 million in 1811. Even allowing for increasing efficiency in census-taking, it is clear that London was demographically booming at the time of the Gidea Hall timber sales.

^[23] But, as late as 1802, Wordsworth could celebrate the early morning view of the City from Westminster Bridge: "All bright and glittering in the smokeless air". Wordsworth indicated that the time was shortly after sunrise which, on 3 September 1802, was at 05.13 GMT. His emphasis upon the stillness of the scene suggests that there was little or no wind to disperse smoke. But his description is puzzling: certainly, very soon, servants would be lighting kitchen stoves to prepare their employers' breakfasts. In 1802, September 3 fell on a Friday: on a Monday, fires would have been lit much earlier to heat water for the weekly washing.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802.

^[24] Between 1784 and 1791, a Maldon timber merchant supplied faggots to a nearby lime kiln which operated a coke-fired oven, presumably to start the fire. J. Booker, Essex and the Industrial Revolution (Chelmsford, 1974), 6.

^[25] Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 96. Daniel Defoe in 1724 noted that Shooters Hill in Kent was "much overgrown with Coppice-wood, which is cut for Faggots … and sent up by Water to London"…. 'Tis incredible what vast Quantities of these used to be laid up at Woolwich, Erith, and Dartford; but since the Taverns in London are come to make Coal-fires in their upper Rooms, that Trade declines". D. Defoe, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain … (1724). There are many editions: this comment comes from the section on Kent.

^[26] Maltsters valued hornbeam faggots, many of them no doubt supplied from Epping Forest. D.W. Coller, The People's History of Essex… (Chelmsford, 1861), 625. E.N. Buxton complained in 1885 that in some parts of Epping Forest, there were as many as 3,000 pollards in an acre of woodland, giving the remarkably small space of 14 square feet to each tree. Landscape historian John Hunter suggested that this density was a response to the demand for faggots by London bakers and maltsters. E.N. Buxton, Epping Forest (London, 1885), 106-7; J. Hunter, The Essex Landscape… (Chelmsford, 1999), 26.

^[27] Arthur Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex (2 vols, London, 1813 ed.), ii, 135 referred to "the late high price of bark", quoting an informant of 1801. In the Hainault Forest timber sale of 1794, over half the price realised was for bark.

^[28] Even in the early 17^th-century, timber in Crown forests in Essex and Hertfordshire was valued at roughly double the rate in the rest of England, which Rackham attributes to the demands of the London market. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 91.

^[29] R. Porter, London: a Social History (London, 2000 ed., cf. 1^st ed. 1994), 168.

^[30] S. Inwood, A History of London (London, 1998), 317.

^[31] Inwood, A History of London, 337-8.

^[32] W. Harrison, ed. G. Edelen, The Description of England (Ithaca, NY, 1968 ed., cf. 1^st ed., 1577), 198.

^[33] A faggot was half a cubic foot of timber. W.R. Fisher, The Forest of Essex … (London, 1887), 261.

^[34] T. Laslett, Timber and Timber Trees… (London, 1875), 73n.

^[35] Tanning was a major activity in Havering until about 1620. Another industry that consumed timber by-products was charcoal manufacture, which left its mark on the local map (Collier Row). This activity came to an end after 1570. M.K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed… (Cambridge, 1991), 135-8.

^[36] I have rounded the sums. The exact figure for the total was £530, nine shillings and sixpence; bark, £312, timber £68, 13 shillings and fourpence; lops and tops, £139, 16 shillings. Fisher, The Forest of Essex, 241.

^[37] Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex, ii, 135. Essex Archives Online notes three timber sales at South Weald, mainly from the Weald Hall estate, between 1804 and 1809. Fraser, South Weald, records a tradition that Lord St Vincent complained about a grove of trees on the neighbouring Weald Hall estate that blocked his view from Rochetts. The squire, Christopher Tower, refused to remove them but a younger member of the family, a junior naval officer, acted on a hint from the admiral that he might secure promotion if the obstacle disappeared. The trees were duly felled, apparently early one morning, and the young man secured his reward on his return to Portsmouth. The story remained "very popular" in the parish throughout the nineteenth century. The ingenious officer was presumably John Tower, who rose to the rank of rear-admiral before his death in 1837, at the age of 59. He is commemorated by a plaque in South Weald parish church.

^[38] The name of Hare Street has been largely obliterated by the suburban spread, but the Unicorn, in a successor building, remains one of the hostelries in a small neighbourhood shopping centre.

^[39] The Times, 19 April 1808, 12 January 1809.

^[40] As discussed later, ash trees were useful and had the advantage of growing rapidly. "Ash is timber, fit for the wheelwright, at the age of twenty years, or less," observed William Cobbett in 1822. W. Cobbett, Rural Rides (ed. A. Briggs, 2 vols, London, 1956), i, 81. There are many editions.  This comment was made in Huntingdonshire.

^[41] The alternative Lombardy poplar had been introduced about 40 years earlier, with one of the first examples planted at St Osyth in Essex in 1767. By 1807, it was "above 70 feet high, and at five feet from the ground measures seven feet three inches in circumference", which pointed to a trunk diameter of about 28 inches. Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex, ii, 150.

^[42] Laslett, Timber and Timber Trees, 67.

^[43] The Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest examples of 'coppice', both as a noun and a verb, to 1538. S.T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Harmondsworth, 1950), 11, traced the term to "about 1470".

^[44] At Castle Hedingham in the late 18^th century, three acres of waterlogged ground beside a river were planted with ash saplings. The young trees were cut after two years to encourage them to sprout ("stooling"). One of the three acres was harvested at eleven years, producing 2,900 poles. These were sold at thirty shillings per hundred, realising £43, ten shillings, the equivalent of an annual income of £3, ten shillings. This compared poorly with the return from arable but was a useful bonus from an acre of land that would otherwise have been useless. Meanwhile, the stumps would broaden into stools, giving a larger surface for regeneration: "the next cutting will of course be much more numerous". Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex, ii, 144.

^[45] There were examples of what was obviously pollarding at Hatfield Forest in 1328 and Writtle's Highwood in 1396-7. O. Rackham, Ancient Woodland… (London, 1980), 195. At Great Canfield in 1420, the manorial court dealt with a case where a tenant was accused of shredding and 'beheading' trees with the intention of making faggots for sale ("schrudendo et decapitando arbores et faciendo de eisdem fegattas ad vendendum": some of the Latin may have been improvised). The offender had only an annual tenancy which did not entitle him to cut timber. G. Eland, At the Courts of Great Canfield Essex (Oxford, 1943), 53-4. The term "pollenger" was recorded for a pollard at Great Canfield in 1581 and twice at Kelvedon Hatch around the same time, a warning against assuming that the emergence of a word dates the beginning of the practice: Eland, 16; F.G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Home. Work & Land (Chelmsford, 1991), 251-2. "Pollen" remained an Essex dialect term for a pollard in the early twentieth century: E. Gepp, An Essex Dialect Dictionary (London, 1923), 88. A variant of pollarding practised in deer parks was 'browse'. Smaller branches were cut and dumped for use as forage during the winter months. Whatever was left by the deer was collected for use as ready-trimmed firewood. In the royal park at Havering-atte-Bower, trees were "lopped and shreded for browze" in 1565, Rackham, Ancient Woodland, 207.

^[46] Rackham reckoned that pollards were cut between 6 and 15 feet above ground. Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 22.

^[47] 'Pollard' is derived from 'poll', an archaic term (except in compounds and derivatives like 'poll tax' and 'polling') referring to the head. In the sixteenth century, it came to be used for a de-horned animal (e.g. a deer that had shed its antlers), and the Oxford English Dictionary traces its application to timber maintenance to 1611.  'Bolling' is dated to 1691, although presumably some equivalent term would have existed earlier. Bolling appears to be related to a term meaning 'swelling'. The temptation to connect it with Anne Boleyn, who was also beheaded, should be resisted.

^[48] In 1885, E.N. Buxton regarded the practice as terminated in Epping Forest. He disapproved of pollarding, arguing that the removal of the higher branches deprived red squirrels of refuges from predators. The reds were obviously facing challenges in the Forest before they were driven out by invading grey squirrels. Buxton, Epping Forest, 79, 106-7.

^[49] Victoria County History of Essex, iv, 114-16, 119, 124.

^[50] Laslett, Timber and Timber Trees, 22.

^[51] Thus the Chelmsford journalist D.W. Coller in 1861: "The  proximity  of  the forest, and  the  pretext  of  procuring  firewood  by  means  of  the  loppings of  the  trees,  which  the  inhabitants  claim  a  right  to  cut  during  the winter  months,  encourage  habits  of  idleness  and  dislike  of  settled labour,  and  in  some  cases  give  occasion  for  poaching,  all  of  which  are injurious  to  the  morals  of  the  poor." The Loughton Vestry, representing the ratepayers (i.e. the upper and middle classes), resolved in 1875 that "the existence of the alleged forestal rights causes great waste and demoralization". Coller, The People's History of Essex, 486-7; W. Addison, Epping Forest… (London, 1945), 219.

^[52] Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 20-2.

^[53] Shredding as a technique to accentuate the height of an avenue can be seen in a well-known Dutch landscape, Hobbema's The Avenue at Middelharnis, in the National Gallery, London, which dates from 1689: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/meindert-hobbema-the-avenue-at-middelharnis.

^[54] Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 75.

^[55] https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/pp268-281.

^[56] "Epping-forest is in many parts little better than a barren heath." W. Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of the Counties of Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex (London, 1809), 2.

^[57] Addison, Epping Forest, 195-6.

^[58] Rackham, The Woods of South-East Essex, 40.

^[59] https://vlex.co.uk/vid/preservation-of-woods-act-808107065.  A corrupt royal official was accused of felling 40 acres of woodland in fourteenth-century Havering, selling for his own profit 400 oaks, plus about 100 of other species. This may point to a local ratio of ten oaks to the acre, no doubt reduced by subsequent intensive harvesting. M.K. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community … (Cambridge, 1986), 144-5.

^[60] In 1744, the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's leased woodland in south-east Essex with the condition that twelve full-sized oaks were to be maintained for each acre, with provision to substitute other species, e.g. elm and ash, if there was a deficiency. The persistence of the formula may perhaps be explained by the institutional inertia of the repetition of paper-work, but it tends to confirm that the twelve-oaks-to-the-acre target was unachievable in an era of pressure upon domestic timber resources. Rackham, The Woods of South-East Essex, 23.

^[61] There is useful information about the exploitation of Hainault in the 18^th century in the report of a parliamentary committee in 1863: British Parliamentary Papers, 1863, Reports of Committees, vi.

^[62] R. Latham and W. Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, iii (London, 1970), 168-70 (18 August 1662).

^[63] W.R. Fisher, The Forest of Essex, 241.

^[64] Wanstead House was demolished in 1824, but Wanstead Park remains. Child had been created Viscount Castlemaine in 1718, but the title was from the Irish peerage and did not confer a seat in the Westminster House of Lords, which he coveted. The grant of timber may have been an attempt to buy him off, but he realised his ambition that same year when he was created Earl Tylney.

^[65] The report was reprinted in British Parliamentary Papers, 1863, Reports of Committees, vi, 75-82, esp. 81. The 18^th century liked capital letters. For the announcement of the Ilford wharf, A.F.J. Brown (ed.), English History from Essex Sources 1750-1900 (Chelmsford, 1952), 63-4.

^[66] The otherwise useful note on 'Forestry' in Victoria County History of Essex, ii (1907), 620-1, mistakenly rendered these figures not as height but in terms of cubic capacity. A tree 30 feet high with a diameter of two feet would indeed contain 30 cubic feet of timber, but the volumes would be considerably reduced in shorter oaks since they would almost certainly have much smaller diameters, e.g. a tree with a 20-foot trunk and a diameter of eighteen inches would contain 11.25 cubic feet of timber.

^[67] Fisher, The Forest of Essex, 241.

^[68] "There is another circumstance mentioned in the Commissioners’ Report, about the state of the timber, in the year 1783, which, I think, must have considerably changed since that period, namely, 'that, out of 11,000 oaks, there were 2,700 fit for the use of the Navy'.  Now, I verily believe that, at the present time, not one-fourth of the number could be found fit for that purpose; and, as to the 7,000 young trees, mentioned in the same Report, there are scarcely any of them that have not, as they attained a certain age, been converted into, and are now become, old pollards; for the right of cutting fire-wood is, in the ideas of the lower sort of people, confirmed and increased, by preventing trees from becoming timber, and converting them to pollards, of which it is the common course of the country to cut the tops for fire-wood; and, in most parts of the Forest, the beauty of the scenery and utility of the timber are totally destroyed by the decapitation of the trees." 'An Old Inhabitant', Thoughts on the Proposed Inclosure of Waltham (Commonly Called Epping) and Hainault Forests... (London,  1818), 15-16

^[69] The wooded areas of south Essex were mostly on hilltops covered with glacial deposits of gravel, which helps to explain why they made poor agricultural land if cleared. It is possible that the geology did not favour the growth of tall oak trees. Young remarked in 1807 that "[t]he woodlands in the higher parts of this country are found very much to favour the growth of an inferior dwarf oak, and hornbeam", while William Cobbett dismissed the oaks around Brentwood "mere scrubs" in 1822. (Young's reference to 'dwarf oak' should not be interpreted as indicating a distinct species.) However, as noted below, around 1800, Lord Petre sold 13 very large oaks for £600, "including top and bark". Young was an expert agriculturalist; Cobbett believed himself to be omniscient but tended to base broad generalisations upon narrow observations. Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex, ii, 136, 150; Cobbett, Rural Rides (ed. A. Briggs), i, 50.

^[70] Ged Martin, " Gidea Park: a suburb and its syllables": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/428-gidea-syllables.

^[71] The 1618 map of Havering may be consulted via https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/result_details.aspx?ThisRecordsOffSet=1&id=151946. It is necessary to log in to the Essex Record Office website to enlarge the image.

^[72] This tract contained some small and irregularly shaped ponds. It was common practice in the construction of a substantial mansion to manufacture bricks on the spot. It may be that this stretch of woodland had been excavated for brick earth for the building of the Eyles mansion c. 1720, and some timber used to bake the spoil into bricks. It was still woodland when the 6-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map was surveyed between 1862 and 1871, but it had been cleared by the time the 25-inch-to-the-mile map was published in 1896. The 25-inch map gave the area. The copy in the National Library of Scotland may be consulted via https://maps.nls.uk/view/104190572.

^[73] J. Hunter, "Essex Springs and Shaws" in K. Neale, ed., Essex 'full of profitable thinges"… (Oxford, 1996), 283-94. The woodland was located at the eastern extremity of what is now Romford Golf Club, the spring / shaw roughly at the west side of the Gidea Park Sports Ground. The modern Links Avenue is between them. No trace of either feature remains. 

^[74] G. Terry, Memories of Old Romford… (London and Romford, 1880), 256; S. Donoghue and D. Tait, Harold Hill and Noak Hill: a History (Havering, 2013), 56-7. When Eastern Avenue / Southend Arterial Road was constructed in the 1920s, a roundabout was needed at the junction with the London-Colchester road. The culture of the times was robust in its attitude to the death penalty, and the local name Gallows Corner was adopted for the landmark. Chapman and André's atlas of 1777 has thumbnail sketches of two gibbets.

^[75] The site of Pettits Farm is now occupied by a secondary school, Marshalls Park Academy.

^[76] E.E. Wilde, Ingatestone and the Great Essex Road… (Oxford, 1913), 391-5. Humphry Repton, who lived at Hare Street, referred to the "constant moving scene" of "droves of cattle, of pigs, or geese" on the highway. H. Repton, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening ... (London,  1816), 235.

^[77] Most of the trees here are probably secondary growth, but the Google Street View visits of 2018 and 2024 show a veteran, which leans out over the pavement between the entrance to the sports ground and the bus-stop layby. It has been pollarded at about four feet above ground, but left to grow into two trunk-like branches and not subsequently harvested. The fact that it was pollarded so low [a] suggests that it was protected by a hedge or paling fence from passing cattle and [b] confirms that the roadside plantation was intended to screen the estate from the highway traffic. It appears to be an oak, but my tree-identification skills are not sufficient for certainty. It may have been planted at about the time the United States declared independence. 

^[78] E.g. an 80-acre (one eighth of a square mile) farm, rectangular in shape and with sides half-a-mile and a quarter-of-a-mile long would have a perimeter of one-and-a-half miles (½ + ½ + ¼ + ¼) in length. Internal field boundaries could easily double that.

^[79] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 36. It is possible that some of the smaller enclosures on the Bocking estate had been incorporated into larger fields in recent times.

^[80] H.F. Westlake, ed., Hornchurch Priory: a Kalendar of Documents…  (London, 1923), 123. The owner, Nicholas de Redynges, had purchased the land from Walter de Habenhatche, and references to "the King's wood called Horoldeswode" confirm the location: 'Giddy Hall' was still regarded as a nickname not suitable for legal proceedings.

^[81] In 1650, a small farm at Noak Hill, Wolves, had 250 timber trees and 400 pollards. Wolves was later amalgamated with a neighbouring holding, Joyes, and in 1811 the combined property covered 111 acres. Rackham calculated 6.7 trees per acre of farmland at Roxwell in 1734, H. Smith, A History of … Havering-atte-Bower, Essex (Colchester, 1925), 60, 204; Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 169.

^[82] Laslett, Timber and Timber Trees, 22; Harrison, ed. Edelen, The Description of England, 279.

^[83] Strictly speaking, elm regenerated not through pollarding but by throwing out vigorous suckers.

^[84] Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, 169. The Roxwell estate also contained 30 pollarded maples and ten hornbeam 'maidens'.

^[85] Applying the Roxwell figures, the Gidea Hall hedgerows would have contained 160 ash and 43 maples. The balance of species could change even within short distances, so these estimates must be regarded as tentative. However, it is very unlikely that the estate's hedgerows could have accounted for the over one thousand ash trees offered in the two auctions.

^[86] Terry, Memories of Old Romford, 66 gives the date as 1465; Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 68 has 1466. Terry quotes the document as specifying 140 acres of "land", with 20 acres each of wood, meadow and pasture. These figures were probably formulaic. Gidea Hall was already one of the largest properties in Havering: it is possible that Sir Thomas Coke simply added an imposing frontage to an existing mansion.

^[87] The 1618 map of Havering shows the area to the south of the house, later an elegant and tree-covered lawn, as "Stone field". In addition to the water mill (apparently removed by 1618), a second artificial pond suggests that there may have been other industrial activity here. In 1524, Hare Street was home to four very wealthy tanners: the 1524 Subsidy (tax) returns show the hamlet to have been one of the wealthiest communities in England. In 1472, a Hare Street tanner had been prosecuted for polluting a stream with hides. As there is no watercourse at the hamlet, this may have been Black's Brook, which flows past Romford and would therefore have been a source of drinking water. McIntosh, A Community Transformed, 130; McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 252. The pond, which has a distinctive outline, is marked on the 1618 field plan (https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/result_details.aspx?ThisRecordsOffSet=1&id=151946) and on the six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map of 1862 to 1871. The twenty-five-inch-to-the-mile map of 1939 shows the outline, but the pond itself had by then been filled in. It was located on the west side of the modern Gidea Avenue.

^[88] McIntosh, A Community Transformed, 121. A giant oak at Bedfords, a mile to the north of Gidea Hall, was split in an 1894 storm. Its 27-foot girth suggests that it was perhaps 300 years old. It would have been too young to be worth felling in the early seventeenth century. Essex Naturalist, viii (1894), 110.

^[89] According to Terry, Memories of Old Romford, 180, Sir Edward Sydenham paid £295 to recover the estate.

^[90] M.K. McIntosh, "The Fall of Tudor Gentle Family", Huntington Library Quarterly, xli (1978), 279-97. The younger Sir Anthony Cooke invested in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's project for the colonisation of Newfoundland. This was patriotic and visionary, but not financially rewarding.

^[91] Queen Marie de Medici was the mother of Charles I's consort, Henrietta Maria. Unpopular in France, she decided to make an unannounced (and unwelcome) visit to her son-in-law, who had problems enough in 1638. To compound the embarrassment, her ship was blown off course and she arrived at Harwich. The 1638 print is reproduced in Ged Martin, "Gidea Park: a suburb and its syllables":

https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/428-gidea-syllables.

^[92] Terry, Memories of Old Romford, 195.

^[93] Hothersall died in 1707, and the sale was completed three years later. Gidea Hall initially passed to two purchasers are assumed to have acted as agents for Eyles, although it is not clear why this procedure was adopted. Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 68.

^[94] P. Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (2 vols, London, 1768), i, 67.

^[95] Two decades later, Morant described Richard Benyon I as "the present worthy possessor", but did not attribute any improvements to him.

^[96] Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 69. A new chimneypiece was installed in 1776-7 (Victoria County History of Essex, vii, 68). "The grounds were much improved by Richard Benyon, Esq. M.P. whose father purchased the manor in the year 1745", wrote Brayley and Britton in 1803: A Topographical and Historical Description of the County of Essex, 476. "The grounds and plantations were much improved by the late Mr Benyon."  D. Lysons, The Environs of London…, i (ii) (2^nd ed., London, 1811), 688. In the first edition (published 1796 as volume iv) Lysons had stated that: "The grounds and plantations have been much improved by the present proprietor." Richard Benyon II had died in 1794.

^[97] The agreement with Solomon Stubbing is noted in Essex Archives Online. The 2.45 acres marked with outline tree cover to the north-east of the mansion on the 25-inch-to-the-mile map surveyed in 1895 may have been orchard, partly protected from westerly winds by the stables.

^[98] The fishponds remain as a half-hidden rustic ornament alongside the modern Heath Drive.

^[99] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 150-1; Victoria County History of Essex, viii, 81.

^[100] When the nearby Hare Hall was built in 1768-9, it too replaced a moated farmhouse. The water table was too high to make it possible for the house to have cellars, and the landscape gardener (Woods) excavated a narrow water feature beside the house. Now dry, this remains as a hollow in the grounds of Royal Liberty School. The creation of suburban streets required surface drainage which lowered the water table, emptying the Spoon Pond in the 1920s. Some of the fish were transferred to the Heath Drive ponds, which survived. The resulting depression proved suitable for conversion into tennis courts. Essex Review, xxxvii (1928), 86. The Spoon Pond would perhaps have appealed to Richard Benyon I, who would have seen similar water features in Mughal garden architecture in India.

^[101] https://ati.woodlandtrust.org.uk/how-to-record/species-guides/beech/.

^[102] Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 150-4 for local examples.

^[103] The avenues were marked on Chapman and André's map of 1777 and their remnants by the Ordnance Survey six-inch-to-the-mile map of 1871. Chapman and André did not record avenue [c], probably because it was not visible from the highway.

^[104] Royal Commission on Historical Monuments… Essex, ii, 203.

^[105] Coller, The People's History of Essex, 625; Buxton, Epping Forest, 111.

^[106] Trollope's character Phineas Finn, a young man making a career in politics, visits Mr Kennedy, a wealthy Glasgow businessman who has built himself a mansion in Perthshire. "Very grand," comments the political boss who accompanies him as they were driven to the front door, "but the young trees show the new man." A. Trollope, Phineas Finn… (1869), ch. xiv.

^[107] Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex, ii, 150. The price of the Thorndon sales was £46, three shillings per load; the Hainault sale (for which see above) yielded £18, nineteen shillings per load.

^[108] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.

^[109] Timber cutting in the two-square-mile royal park at Havering-atte-Bower was carefully controlled throughout the thirteenth century: between 1225 and 1274, permission was granted to fell 350 mature trees, mostly oaks, while another 250 were removed for firewood, apparently near the end of their lives. This may make the felling of 2,400 hardwood trees, 480 of them oaks, in the two years 1808-9 seem very severe. However, Lord Petre had planted 30,000 trees at Thorndon in the seventeen-thirties, although again in a much larger park. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community, 18; Hunter, The Essex Landscape, 152.

^[110] White's Directory of Essex (1848), 377; Coller, The People's History of Essex, 608; Short Spins around London (London, 1906), 180. Coller (who hyphenated the adjectival phrase) may have been merely copying.

^[111] The Book of the Exhibition … Romford Garden Suburb, Gidea Park (London, 1911), 49, 51.