The Wyre Forest sits on Bewdley’s western edge and it is not scenery. For most of the town’s history it was a working landscape, and a good deal of what went down the river from the quay started as a tree.
A hunting ground first
In the medieval period the forest was the Mortimers’ hunting ground. They held the manor from about 1100 and their territory ran deep into Wales, and a wooded chase on the doorstep was part of what made the holding worth having. Deer were the point of it. A survey of the manor made in the seventeenth century still counted something like a hundred and eighty head of deer in the park, and set out the value of the herbage that fed them alongside the acreages of each coppice by name: the Lodge Coppice, the Old Bynde, the Park End, Hedgwick great and little, the Goodmore, the Lynolls.
Protecting the woods was a running battle. In 1616 James I sent instructions to the keepers of Bewdley Park, on pain of a five hundred pound penalty, that no wood was to be taken except for fencing the coppices, that browse wood was to be limited, that no more cottages were to be erected, and that the old Swanmote courts were to be revived. Seven years later there was a formal complaint about the “waste and spoyle daily committed by the Inhabitants of Bewdley in his Majesty’s woods”, including one Thomas Smith, his wife and daughter, who were caught cutting and carrying away poles in the Lords Yard and who beat the keeper soundly when he objected.
What the forest was for
Timber was the obvious product and it went two ways: as building material, and as fuel. A great deal of Wyre oak was burned rather than built with, converted into charcoal in the woods themselves, and the charcoal fed the metalworking trades of the wider region.
The bark was worth having too. Oak bark is rich in tannin, and it was the raw material of the tanning industry that made Bewdley smell as it did for several centuries. There were as many as twelve tanneries in the town in the Tudor period, and their bark came off the doorstep. It is why the town could sustain a leather trade on the scale it did, and why tanned leather is one of the goods listed as going downriver from the quay.
Underneath the trees there is coal. The Wyre Forest coalfield was worked by bell pits, a simple and very old method where a shaft is sunk to the seam and the coal dug outward at the bottom until the sides threaten to collapse, at which point the pit is abandoned and another sunk beside it. The result, centuries later, is a distinctive pattern of shallow circular hollows across parts of the forest floor, and the evidence can still be found if you know what you are looking at.
The forest also produced the raw material for smaller trades. Horn was worked into combs and drinking cups in the town, a manufacture that lasted into the nineteenth century and outlived far grander industries. Bowyers and fletchers appear in the parish registers of Elizabeth’s reign, making bows and arrows in a town surrounded by suitable wood.
Wyre now
The forest today is one of the largest surviving areas of ancient woodland in England, a National Nature Reserve, and the thing most visitors to Bewdley walk into without much thought about what it used to be. The coppice names in that old survey are still on the map in places. The bell pits are still underfoot. And the reason the town could trade in leather, charcoal, timber, horn and caps at all is that this was here first.