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Dulwich Woods
Successive lords of the manor of Dulwich, i.e. Bermondsey Abbey, the Calton family, Edward Alleyn and Dulwich College, regarded the Dulwich woods as a particularly important part of their possessions. Evidence for this is that the earliest surviving surveys of the estate, carried out in 1542 and 1544 for Henry VIII after the dissolution of Bermondsey Abbey, deal exclusively with the woods, and list in great detail the names and acreages of the various coppices, and even the age and market value of the trees growing in each of them. At that time, the woods covered a considerably larger area than they do today, stretching across the whole of the range of hills on the south and east of the manor, a total of between 300 and 400 acres. Sir Francis Calton's contract to sell the manor to Alleyn in 1605 refers to "the Coppices or enclosed woods conteininge 400 acres worth per annum to be ffarmed- 120ac."
Those words "to be ffarmed" are significant. None of those early owners was interested in the woods for the ecological or aesthetic reasons which lie behind recent struggles to preserve what little is left of them. Their motives in retaining large areas of woodland were mainly, if not wholly, commercial. Wood was, after all, the principal building material until the mid-18th century, and the chief source of fuel for most people. In addition to this almost limitless demand for his product, the woodland owner benefited from negligible labour costs and other low overheads.
The fact that wood was indispensable to everyday life was often a source of conflict between the lord of the manor and his tenants, who were entitled by custom to certain rights over the common land, which included the woodlands. The Calton family tried to curtail these rights, but by bringing actions in the Court of Chancery the tenants were able to enforce them. After Alleyn's purchase of the manor, he negotiated successfully with the tenants to commute their rights of common for payments in money or land, which enabled him to enclose large areas of the common and convert them to arable use. He duly set about doing so, assisted by certain of his tenants, most of whom were rewarded for their services by being granted leases of the land thus 'grubbed up' at low rents. Alleyn ordained (in his Statutes governing the College and its estates) that the woodland which remained should in future be managed on sound business principles. His intention was to divide it into ten coppices of approximately 20 acres each, one coppice to be felled and sold each year when the wood was of ten years' growth, turn and turn about. The rest was to be for the exclusive use of the College. He also stipulated that timber trees should be sold only to tenants of the College, for rebuilding or repairing their tenements.
For a long time not all of these provisions were observed by the College. Admittedly each coppice was felled, and its timber sold, on a regular ten-yearly rotational basis, but many of the sales were not to Dulwich tenants. For example, between 1645 and 1654 William Locke, Citizen and Fishmonger of London, enjoyed a monopoly of such sales, there being no less than nine of them in which he is named as purchaser. The Clowders of Beckenham, William and Richard, enjoyed similar advantages in the 1660s. There was also a marked disparity between the sizes of the various coppices, although this did lessen in time, as a comparison of the following tables will show. The first is taken from a 'Terrier' of the College's lands compiled in 1668:
| Vicars Oak Coppice | 32 acres |
| Kings Coppice | 39 acres |
| Forty Acres Coppice | 25 acres [!] |
| Low Cross Coppice | 32 acres |
| Peckamins Coppice | 44 acres |
| Giles, The Park, and Ambrook Hill Coppices | 47 acres |
| Fifty Acres Coppice | 49 acres |
| ---- | |
| Total | 258 acres |
The second comes from a report by the College Surveyor, John Dugleby, in 1799:
| The Lapse & part of Ambroke Hill | 22a. 1r. 26p. |
| Ambroke Hill (remainder) | 20a. 0r. 28p. |
| Peckermans No. 1 | 28a. 3r. 22p. |
| Peckermans No. 2 | 28a. 1r. 23p. |
| Low Cross | 31a. 2r. 20p. |
| Vicars Oak East part | 20a. 0r. 00p. |
| Vicars Oak West part | 20a. 0r. 00p. |
| Kings Coppice No. 1 | 19a. 3r. 22p. |
| Kings Coppice No. 2 | 20a. 2r. 22p. |
| -------------- | |
| Total: | 212a. 0r. 09p. |
It will be apparent that in the interval between these two surveys there had been further encroachment into the woodland. Moves in this direction can be traced back to a resolution passed as the College Audit meeting in March 1719, that "whereas it hath been made appear that the Revenue of the College may be considerably improved by grubbing up part of the Woods" it was ordered that, if the College Visitor (the Archbishop of Canterbury, ex officio) gave his approval, ".....200 acres be set out in Ten Falls, 20 acres in a Fall, according to the Statutes, and that the Remainder shall be grubbed up and let to some able Tenant or Tenants.....". Perhaps the Archbishop was slow to give his blessing to the plan, as it was not until the 1780s that it was fully carried out. First the larger part of the Fifty Acres Wood (now holes 10 to 16 of Dulwich & Sydenham Hill Golf Club) was grubbed up, and in the 1790s the Forty Acres Wood (in the vicinity of Sydenham Hill Station) followed suit.
During all this time the College employed one among its tenants to maintain the woods and the boundary fences between them. The College Woodman between 1687 and 1691 was John Hamond, whose official Diary (perhaps the correct description is 'Log-book') still survives. The majority of entries refer to a task, on which he was engaged from mid-December until April, which he records with the words: "I plish wood". From time to time he "made bavens", occasionally he "cutt runts", but mostly he "plisht wood". This ob- scure operation, variously spelled 'plash-', 'pleash-' or 'pleshing', in fact consisted of splitting small branches lengthwise, and intertwining them to form the fences dividing the coppices.
In the 19th century, and even more so in the 20th, the growth of population has made further depredation of the Dulwich Woods inevitable. A lease to George Wythes in 1853 of more than 67 acres, between Dulwich Wood Avenue and what was to become Crystal Palace Parade, was assigned to the Crystal Palace Company, and the land parcelled up into building plots, with the new Farquhar Road as the main estate road linking the Parade with Dulwich Wood Park. Incidentally, it may interest readers to know that the new City Nature Park in Farquhar Road, to be known as Upper Wood, in fact straddles the boundaries of two coppices (or three, if one counts Vicar's Oak Coppice - of which most of it is comprised - as two coppices, East and West; the remainder of the site, the north-west portion that is, was formerly part of King's Coppice, otherwise King's Wood). When the houses in the Farquhar Road area were built in the late 1860s, much of the woodland was retained, and in addition the various gardens were laid out in such a way as to blend into the woods behind, instead of the rear fences forming a stark boundary between them. The same policy (one assumes it was intentional) was adopted in the case of the large family mansions, such as Beltwood, Woodlands, and The Hoo, erected along Crescent Wood Road and the brow of Sydenham Hill at about the same time. Moving north-east, towards Elliot Bank, different considerations seem to have applied, however. The absence of trees in any number between the northern end of Sydenham Hill down to the railway cutting is particularly noticeable, for example, on the 1876 Estate Map. This is not to say, of course, that there was not a substantial number of trees; there simply were not enough of them to justify the cartographer in designating the area as woodland.
This brings us to a point which deserves to be made for the sake of historical accuracy, although it may disturb the beliefs of some local residents. The Dulwich Society has, quite rightly, been at the forefront of the battle to ensure that the requirements of private develop- ers and public planning authorities are tempered by the need to preserve the local amenity. Reference is sometimes made when such arguments arise to "our unspoiled woodland", and even to "the last vestiges of the great North Wood". It is true that the Dulwich Woods were once part of the great primeval forest known as North Wood, from which Norwood takes its name. However, it can be shown that for at least the last 450 years the hand of man has been much in evidence to regulate the natural development of the woods, in pursuit of profit. If the Dulwich Woods deserve to be retained, it is because of what they are, not because of a misguided view as to what they once were.
Patrick Darby
[from 'History Supplement No. 1, first published by the Dulwich Society, October 1982]