Explore the latest news and find out what's on this month
Explore our learning offer for schools, families and community groups
Uncover the rich history of Elmbridge with our latest online exhibitions
Want to discover more about your local area?
In the third and final blog of the series, local resident Chris Dawson explores the enclosure of Elmbridge Hundred.
Highlighting the power of the monarch during the Tudor period, Henry VIII relentlessly pursued his desire to create a royal hunting ground to enable him to continue one of his preferred activities following a jousting injury in 1536.
With a wide-reaching impact across Walton on Thames, Walton Leigh, Oatlands, Weybridge, East Molesey, West Molesey, Esher and beyond, the Act which came into force in 1539, caused significant upset amongst locals resulting in an appeal to the Lieutenant of the Chase.
Read on to find out how these tumultuous events impacted local lives for over a decade.
Hampton Court Chase: Approximate boundary within Elmbridge Hundred marked in red
The more observant landowners and commoners living in Elmbridge Hundred in the summer of 1537 would have seen the first signs of impending change. Official-looking men were turning up unannounced in most of the towns and villages, taking measurements, checking boundaries, writing down lists of owners and asking questions about the value of landholdings. Later, back in London, the results of these surveys were turned into a set of proposed land purchases.
In the autumn, there was increased activity on the Thames as boatloads of timber were transported from crown property in Surrey and Berkshire. Peasants working the land, particularly around Byfleet, Cobham and Esher, watched as wood was unloaded from wagons then chopped into posts and rails by men wearing green liveries, whilst others erected a fence, shored up by earth on either side for strength, and dug out a deep ditch in front. At intervals, gates were placed to allow horses and carts to pass through, and there were styles for those on foot. Occasionally, a ‘deer leap’ was created — lowering the height of the fence and installing soft sand on the inner side — that allowed deer to enter, but not exit.
In a matter of a few months, the locals would find themselves enclosed within a royal hunting ground, Hampton Court Chase, that came with a physical barrier, but also a legal one, that combined together would impact their lives for over a decade.
The origin of the royal chase was the unseating of Henry VIII during a jousting competition in January 1536, when he was crushed beneath his horse and lay unconscious for so long that onlookers thought he had died. In the aftermath, the existing sores on his legs became infected and would not heal. In constant discomfort, and requiring assistance to walk, his mood darkened, possibly exacerbated by a head injury, and he became bad tempered and irritable. Unable to participate in the sports he enjoyed, he compensated by eating and drinking more, which combined with his newly sedentary circumstances, led to a rapid increase in weight.
A 20th century postcard from the museum collection depicting the West Front and Gatehouse of Hampton Court Palace
The conundrum of how to deal with Henry’s lack of outdoor pleasurable pursuits paused during the terrible events of the summer of 1536 and the downfall of Anne Boleyn, then were taken up again the following year when a solution was proposed by the Privy Council. Hampton Court was the king’s favourite palace, which he had transformed to showcase his own tastes in entertainment — feasting, music, dancing and gambling — so it would make sense to situate it at the heart of a great hunting ground so that Henry, who could now just about be lifted on to a suitable horse, would not have to travel far to hunt. This could be achieved by purchasing all of the land to the west of the palace, below the Thames and adjacent to the rivers Mole and Wey, thereby creating a royal chase that would continue all the way to the edge of Windsor Forest. The advantage of creating a chase partly bounded by three rivers was the reduced cost of fencing, known as ‘paling’.
The Act itself, which was the outcome of all of the preparatory work, was titled ‘Whereby Hampton Court is Made an Honor’, and came into force on the first of October 1539. This formalised a legal agreement, or indenture, in two parts. The first concerned the acquisition (by purchase, exchange or via dissolution) of all of the manors over a wide area of Surrey and Middlesex, which represented the greater landholding of the ‘Honour’ of Hampton Court.
The second part was the more specific agreement creating Hampton Court ‘Chase’, between King Henry VIII and a long list of named freeholders and copyholders in the Lordships, manors, towns and villages of East and West Molesey, Walton, Esher, Weybridge, parts of Cobham and other parishes and hamlets falling within the boundary of the chase, and applied to all of their lands, meadows, woods and pastures. At the top of the list was Sir Richard Page, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Vice-Chamberlain in the household of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, and High Sheriff of Surrey. Page had been imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1536 during the downfall of Anne Boleyn, on charges of treason and adultery, but later released on the advice of Thomas Cromwell. The name of John Machyn of Weybridge was also included whose servant, Alice Hamond, was subject to a violent attack on May Day 1536, which was reported in state papers.
All of these “shall from henceforth be free chase and warren for all manner of beasts of venery and warren, and shall have all such and like liberties, jurisdictions and privileges as any ancient chase or forest within this realm has or of right ought to have, and every person and persons that shall fortune hereafter to trespass or offend within the said new chase, shall incur and run into danger penalties and forfeitures as if the same offence had been done or committed in any other chase or within this Realm of England.”
The Act also laid out the rules and benefits that applied. The farmers were allowed to cut down and use or sell trees within their own property, and were allowed to fence off their own fields, but only whilst the crops were growing. Once the harvest was over, the officers of the chase would check that the deer were allowed free rein again. In recompense for their inconveniences, rents were reduced by one third, and fines on inheritance by a half.
The king had been somewhat surprised that he had not been able to just clear his chase of people by the power of royal prerogative, and had been obliged to send out his commissioners to undertake negotiations, but he could henceforth look out from his palace directly onto his new hunting ground. It is highly unlikely that any courtiers would have dared to comment publicly upon the physical and mental changes that had taken place to bring it into existence, but the writer of a later Act of the Privy Council, after Henry’s death, described the situation at hand succinctly: “The Chase was but newly and very lately erected in the latter days of the king of famous memory, when his highness waxed heavy with sickness, age and corpulence of body, and might not travel so readily abroad, but was constrained to seek to have his game and pleasure ready and at hand, the which his loving subjects were content for the comfort and ease of his majesty to suffer, trusting of a sufficient amends or relief to be had after.”
The Royal Hunting Grounds were controlled by Forest Law
The ‘loving subjects’ of Walton, Weybridge, Oatlands, Brooklands, Byfleet, Esher, Cobham, and East and West Molesey were less than pleased to find themselves fenced-in, and soon became familiar with the antics of the royal hunting parties. By the early 1540s, Henry VIII had tempered his expectations and, no longer capable of a wild pursuit with a pack of dogs, had to content himself with what he considered less manly methods. Sometimes, he chased the deer gingerly on horseback down defined avenues cut through the forest, until they were caught in nets. At other times, the deer were flushed out of their hiding places by bloodhounds and pursued by greyhounds past a platform, known as a ‘standing’, where the royal hunting party shot at them with longbows or crossbows. This was a preferred method when the ladies wanted to participate, as they could use lightweight bows. At Oatlands Palace, the deer were rounded up in advance and held in a pen before being released to run through the rain of arrows.
For the common people who had rarely, if ever, given a thought to the definition of the land on which they were scraping a living, being told that they were no longer subject to the common law of the land, but were to obey ‘Forest Law’, was somewhat of a revelation. Legally, a forest was a large, typically wooded, expanse of land where the hunting rights belonged to the crown, and where the deer roamed freely. A chase was a private forest that only a select group of high-ranking nobles was permitted to create within their own estates where they could hunt deer and wild boars, and also, if they were granted the right to a ‘free warren’, to hunt smaller game such as foxes, hares, rabbits, pheasants and partridges. A park, on the other hand, was distinguishable by being fenced on all sides, so that the deer could not escape and were more easily managed. There must have been some confusion, therefore, when the indenture was read out, because Hampton Court Chase was clearly a royal forest, but at the same time it was enclosed, so was really a park, but it was called a chase. However, no-one was going to question the king’s wording.
Forest laws developed from the twelfth century to protect the wellbeing of the hunted wildlife at the expense of anything else. As crown possessions, these animals were clearly not to be poached or taken from the forest, but the regulations extended to their habitat and food sources, so that they must be able to wander at will within the boundary defined by the fence and eat whatever they wanted. Moreover, there were many other rules that now had to be observed, and anyone found in contravention faced punishment by fine or imprisonment.
Residents were informed about a series of restrictions: that they were banned from supplementing their meagre diets by hunting rabbits, or any game birds, or from taking fish from the ponds; that if they ventured out after dark, they ran the risk of being accused of night poaching; that their cattle would not be allowed to graze on common land, if the deer were present; that they could no longer remove the undergrowth from the woods which they used for fuel in the winter, as this was a food source for the deer; and that they could only leave Elmbridge Hundred, for example to go to the market towns, though specified gates. Movement was even more critically controlled during certain periods of the year, such as the weeks around Midsummer’s Day when the red and fallow deer gave birth. Even finding a deer that had apparently died of natural causes was fraught with danger — being found in possession of venison, and especially selling it, was a crime as it was only permitted to be gifted, as a favour evoking status, by the king or forest owner.
There was soon much distress over the impact of Forest Law, especially amongst the poorest. In theory, the agreement allowed fences to be put up to protect crops, but in practice this was only during certain times of the year when the wheat and barley were growing, and their own flimsy barriers gave little protection. In the summers, constant crop damage by the herds of deer resulted over time in arable land being left uncultivated, and woodland pastures became over-grazed producing treeless commons and heaths on which no animals could survive. In advance of the winters, the forest rangers took supplies of fodder and stored it away for the deer in locked buildings. Unable to subsist, families went hungry until many smallholders were forced out of the area, abandoning cottages that fell into ruin.
There was little scope, or resolve, to fight back. Elsewhere, other communities had resorted to tearing down fences at night and making off with the wood for firewood, but as the king’s fearsome reputation grew, no-one in such close proximity to the court dared to turn to violence, although in some areas the situation became so dreadful by 1545 that a few desperate people made an official complaint to the Lieutenant of the Chase.
On New Year’s Day 1540, only three months after he had been appointed the first Lieutenant of Hampton Court Chase, Sir Anthony Browne faced one of the two incidents in his life that could have resulted in his swift execution.
Sir Anthony Browne, by unknown artist c. 1550. From the National Portrait Gallery collection.
As a close friend of Henry VIII, he had accompanied the king to Rochester Castle where the plan — a misconceived attempt at chivalry — was to surprise Anne of Cleves (who was on her way to London to become the next Queen) in disguise. According to Browne’s own words, written down in his belatedly candid deposition at the subsequent Convocation to examine the matter, Henry asked him to enter her chamber in advance and tell her that he had brought a New Year’s gift and ask her if she would like to see it. Expecting to be confronted with the epitome of beauty that he had conceived in his mind, Browne was met instead with a group of ladies-in-waiting, none of whom stood out in particular. Having been directed to the princess, he was “never more dismayed in all my life, lamenting in my heart to see the lady that was so far and so unlike that which was reported.” Unwilling, potentially fatally, to warn the king, Sir Anthony noted “in his majesty’s countenance such a discontentment and misliking in her person… that he tarried not to speak to her twenty words.” Rather than offer the richly garnished sable scarf and cap himself, Henry sent Sir Anthony with the presents the next morning.
Sir Anthony Browne’s primary title was Master of the Horse, one of the three great Officers of the Royal Household, in which he was responsible for the king’s horses, whether used for war, pageantry or hunting. The role of Lieutenant of Hampton Court Chase was therefore a natural, and profitable, addition to his portfolio of offices which had allowed him to build up major landholdings in Sussex and Surrey, where he was a Justice of the Peace and a representative for the county in parliament on four occasions. Given his busy schedule, he employed a number of men to enforce Forest Law in the chase, including Forest Keepers and Underkeepers who maintained the fencing, managed the trees and timber, fed the deer, checked the wildlife numbers, organised the hunts and looked after the lodges, and kept an eye out for poachers.
The second life-threatening incident occurred in January 1547, when Sir Anthony Browne “undertook the dangerous task of telling the King of his approaching end”, an assignment for which he was probably the only volunteer. Henry VIII appears to have accepted his fate, however, since he appointed Browne as guardian to Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth, and he personally informed them of their father’s death. As Master of the Horse, he had a major role in the funeral arrangements and then, in February, in the coronation. A painting that hung for many years in his descendants’ seat at Cowdray House showed him in the procession, accompanying the nine-year-old King Edward VI along the streets of London that had been gravelled so that the horses would not slip on the ice, past the crowds lining Goldsmith’s Row, on the south side of Cheapside, with the goldsmith’s shops “set out with cups and beakers of gold, and the master of each shop standing at his door ready to salute the young king as he went by.”
On the third of September 1545 at Oatlands Palace, a group of ‘poor men’ representing almost the whole of Elmbridge and some adjacent areas — Walton; Weybridge; East and West Molesey; Cobham; Esher; Byfleet; Thames Ditton; Wisley; Hersham and Shepperton — stood nervously before the eight members of the Privy Council. They had been summoned to be examined about complaints that they had made to the Lieutenant of the Chase regarding their impoverished circumstances which, they maintained, were the direct result of their commons, meadows and pastures being enclosed within the fences and “Overlaid with the deer now increasing daily upon them, very many households of the same parishes be let fall down, the families decayed … the country thereabout in manner made desperate”. The council was sympathetic and proposed that a commission be set up to record their grievances in writing. Unfortunately, no-one — not even Sir Anthony Browne who was usually the most fearless — felt up to the job of confronting the king with an account of the impact of his wayward deer.
On this occasion all was done properly, with the Council of Augmentations formulating fifteen articles designed to establish which of the complaints could be upheld, or was unsubstantiated, and what parts of the management and maintenance of the chase should be kept or changed. These formed the basis of a survey whose overseers selected twenty-four ‘substantial and discreet men’ of Elmbridge to answer under oath. The findings were then corroborated by visits to the hunting grounds, and by further interrogatories undertaken by Sir Anthony Browne prior to his death later the same year of 1548 at the manor house he had built for himself in Byfleet.
There was broad agreement on the conclusions, since the complaints of physical damage now aligned with the economic interests of the crown, where a notable decrease in revenue and rents, combined with the potential costs involved in making repairs to the fences, had become evident. So it was that in early May 1548, “upon mature deliberation weighed and considered”, it was agreed in the council chamber at Westminster that Hampton Court Chase would be ‘dechased’, with the proviso that the king would be permitted to use the land as a chase again at any future time should he wish to. The deer were to be rehomed in Windsor Park, and the fencing was to remain in place until Michaelmas when it would be removed, and the unenclosed land returned to its former tenants.
Finally, after a decade of suffering, the inhabitants of Elmbridge Hundred could return to a sense of normality.
King Henry VIII was badly injured in a jousting tournament, marking the start of health problems and weight gain.
Survey of Elmbridge Hundred carried out by King’s Commissioners; first sections of fencing erected.
Act of Privy Council creating the Honour and Chase of Hampton Court; Sir Anthony Browne appointed as first Lieutenant of Hampton Court Chase.
‘Poor men’ of Elmbridge brought before Privy Council at Oatlands Palace to be questioned about their complaints.
Sir Anthony Browne told King Henry VIII of his impending death; Henry died on 28th January.
Hampton Court Chase was ‘dechased’ and Sir Anthony Browne died at Byfleet Manor.
