Assarting facts for kids

Assarting is when people clear forest land to use it for agriculture (farming) or other things. In old English land law, it was against the rules to clear any part of a royal forest without special permission. This was considered a very serious offense.

It was worse than just cutting down trees. When you "waste" a forest, you might cut down trees or bushes, but they can grow back. Assarting meant completely digging up all the trees. It was like totally removing the forest from that area.

The word assart also referred to the piece of land that had been cleared. Assart rents were payments made to the British Crown for these cleared forest lands. The word comes from the French word essarter, which means to remove or clear woodland. In northern England, this practice was sometimes called ridding.

How Assarting Was Done

In the Middle Ages, the land that was cleared was usually common land. This means it was land that everyone in the community could use. But after assarting, the cleared space became private property.

People cleared land in different ways:

• Often, a single farmer would cut out a clearing from the woodland. They would then create a hedged field around it.
• Sometimes, groups of people or even whole villages worked together. The cleared land was then divided into strips and shared among the farmers who rented land.
• Religious groups, especially the Cistercians (a type of monk), also sometimes cleared land. Local lords (powerful landowners) did this too.

The cleared land often left behind a special type of hedge, called an assart hedge. These hedges often have many woodland trees like small-leafed lime or wild service. They also contain trees that don't usually grow in planted hedges, such as hazel.

You can still see examples of these hedges today. For instance, in Dorset, the hedges in the west and east of the county are different. At Hatfield Broad Oak in Essex, modern hedges still follow the lines of an ancient forest. And in Shelley in Suffolk, there's a very long hedge made of coppiced lime trees. This hedge is a leftover from a forest that was cleared in the 1800s.

A Look Back at Assarting

Assarting has been happening since Mesolithic times, which was many thousands of years ago. It often helped when there were too many people for the available land. Clearing more land meant more space for farming and living.

During the 13th century, a lot of assarting took place. However, it slowed down in the 14th century because of problems with the environment and the economy. The Black Death, a terrible disease that spread in the late 1340s, caused many people to die. This left the countryside with fewer people, and many areas that had been cleared for farming turned back into woodland.

A historian named Richard Muir described assarting as being "like bites from an apple." This means it was usually done in small sections. But sometimes, very large areas were cleared. Occasionally, people even specialized in assarting. Some families even got the last name 'Sart' because their ancestors were known for clearing land.

You can still find clues about assarting in the names of fields in Britain. Names like 'Stocks', 'Stubbings', 'Stubs', 'Assart', 'Sart', 'Ridding', 'Royd', 'Brake', or 'Breach' often come from this practice. Many places in Northern France called 'Les Essarts' or ending with '-sart' also refer to this historical land clearing.