A HISTORY OF SURREY and some Sussex iron may have come through by the Godstone and Croydon road. But for the most part the ' backwoods ' of Surrey were impenetrably sealed to any considerable commerce and to warlike opera- tions. It throws light upon the preparations against invasion, more than once, to remember that an enemy landing upon the Sussex coast before about 1750 could not have marched upon London by the shortest line with baggage and artillery beyond the lightest. The character of the woodland skirts of the county led to a curious chapter in its mediaeval history. Besides the great forest which made the southern parts of Surrey a wilderness in the earlier Middle Ages, and which at the time of the Domesday Survey had rendered useless or impossible any strict delimitation between it and Sussex, a forest country lay upon the north-west of the county also. The whole of the west was girdled by it indeed. The Wealden Forest was originally connected with Woolmer Forest and Alice Holt Wood in Hampshire. North of the Wey valley about Farnham the barren heaths of Bagshot Sand, sandy commons studded with clumps of thorn and fir, with peat bogs in the hollows between them, extended to the slopes above the Thames valley and the mouth of the Wey, where the local names bear witness to woods existing in early days. This was a thinly inhabited country, all forest in the original sense of the word, that is wild uncultivated land. On what particular principle the boundary line between Hampshire and Berkshire and Surrey had been drawn through it does not appear. Probably the limits of the Chertsey lands at Egham and Chobham, the latter including at least part of Windlesham, and the limits of Pirbright, detached from Woking and belonging to the de Clares, served to fix part of the boundary, so as to throw into Surrey the estates of these essentially Surrey landowners. The fact that the Surrey boundary was recognized as including all these places helped to limit later an attempted extension of royal rights which forms an interesting episode in mediaeval Surrey history. The extension of the royal forests was an important object to the king. Their creation may have been due to a love of hunting ; their continuance and enlargement certainly aimed at other ends. Forests embraced in their limits inhabited places and cultivated lands, and the king was master in his forests in a way in which even an early Plantagenet king was not master elsewhere. Justices of the forests, bailiffs and stewards over-rode the jurisdiction of the sheriff and the ordinary law. Local franchises, and even ecclesiastical rights, could not stand against them ; and there no earl intercepted the third penny of the royal revenues. Windsor was a forest in the time of the Conqueror, and even then included land in Surrey. 1 Henry II. further proceeded to afforest his manors of Guildford, Woking, Brookwood and part of Stoke, and finally declared the whole county to be forest. 2 So at least it was subsequently affirmed with apparent truth, though the stretch of power 1 Domesday, 32, a. 2, Pirford. 3 Close Rolls, 9 Hen. III. m. 6. 356
