Have you ever wondered why so many of Epping Forest’s ancient trees are in such very unique shapes? This is due to an ancient right of wood harvesting known as ‘lopping’, where the trees were cut, or lopped by local people, according to custom at regular intervals, usually for fuel.
There were two main types of lopping: pollarding and coppicing. The custom of lopping in Epping Forest stopped in the 19th century when the City of London Corporation took over ownership and management of the Forest. Many of the ancient trees you see today bear the signs of being pollarded or coppiced, or sometimes both!
Below is the excerpt from Getting To Know Epping Forest by Ken Hoy (2010), where these terms are explained.
Pollard
The ancient right of Wood, harvesting wood usually for fuel, at regular intervals of 12 to 18 years, was known as ‘lopping’. The trees were cut or lopped according to custom, some six to eight feet or so from the ground, and the beheaded tree was called a ‘pollard’. The new shoots could then grow out of reach of the browsing cattle and deer and form new branches. Trees beheaded for the first time were called ‘maiden pollards’.
All trees that have been beheaded and subsequently lopped at intervals are referred to as pollards. Traditionally, a number of trees in the lopped thickets were left unpollarded as timber trees. It was customary for a different area to be cut each year and then allowed to re-grow before that area was lopped again. Over the centuries, trees could therefore reach great age and size. Thousands of these old pollards are still growing in the Forest today.
Coppice
An equally ancient method of harvesting or lopping wood was by ‘coppicing’. In this case, the growth was cut down close to the ground and regularly recut after a number of years. As the new shoots would then become vulnerable to browsing by animals, the practice of coppicing usually only occurred in enclosed woodland, often privately owned with no ‘common’ rights of grazing; such woods would be fenced against deer and cattle. The coppiced stumps or ‘stools’, like the pollards, when regularly recut, survived almost indefinitely and eventually could reach a great size and age.
Coppards
Much of Epping Forest was pollarded as it was ‘common’ grazing land. But, what are apparently very ancient coppice ‘stools’ can be seen in Epping Forest, thus in past centuries, some areas must have been coppiced. This can be seen in parts of the northern Manors of Epping, Waltham Holy Cross, Theydon, and Loughton. However, at a later time, the custom of cutting the coppice growth to the ground seems to have ceased. For, when large enough, the well-grown ‘shoots’ from these coppiced clumps began to be treated as pollards and cut or lopped at regular intervals.This practice then continued until pollarding ceased. The term ‘coppard’ has been coined to describe these pollards that are growing in circular groups with a coppiced origin. Many of the large coppiced ‘stools’, now with their group of coppards – each group being really one ‘tree’ – must be the oldest living things to be seen in the Forest today. Judging by their circumference, some may be well over a thousand years old. There is a reference to coppicing in the Forest, in Loughton, in 1582, and several complaints bought to the Forest Court in the 17th century of failure to fence after coppicing.
It is difficult to know when the practice of coppicing ceased and harvesting the wood of the coppice ‘groups’ changed to pollarding. But during the 17th and 18th centuries, much of the old Forest law was disregarded and customs changed. Judging by the amount of scar tissue on the crown of many coppards, it could not have been later than the end of the 18th century that the coppice groups began to be pollarded.
- Coppice stool or stump showing one year of regrowth
- Coppice stool after six years of regrowth. The length of the relopping cycle would depend upon use requirements
- Coppard cluster: originally of coppice origin, but well grown poles were treated as maiden pollards at least 200 years previously and then regularly relopped at intervals as pollards.