Hatfield Forest (England)

Hatfield Forest is a 403.2-hectare (996-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Essex, England, 3 mi (4.8 km) east of Bishop's Stortford. It is also a National Nature Reserve and a Nature Conservation Review site. It is owned and managed by the National Trust. A medieval warren in the forest is a Scheduled Monument. Hatfield is the only remaining intact Royal Hunting Forest and dates from the time of the Norman kings. Other parts of the once extensive Forest of Essex include Epping Forest to the southwest, Hainault Forest to the south and Writtle Forest to the east. Hatfield Forest was established as a Royal hunting forest in the late eleventh century, following the introduction of fallow deer and after Forest Laws were imposed on the area by the king. Deer hunting and chasing was a popular sport for Norman kings and lords, and the word 'forest', in its legal sense, refers to a woodland area for hunting wild game. In the case of Hatfield, the area under Forest Law consisted of woodlands with plains. In his book about the site, The Last Forest, botanist and rural historian Oliver Rackham argues that "Hatfield is of supreme interest in that all the elements of a medieval Forest survive: deer, cattle, coppice woods, pollards, scrub, timber trees, grassland and fen ... As such it is almost certainly unique in England and possibly in the world ... The Forest owes very little to the last 250 years ... Hatfield is the only place where one can step back into the Middle Ages to see, with only a small effort of the imagination, what a Forest looked like in use."