Keele Research Repository

As part of Parliament’s dismemberment of the English monarchy an Act was passed in July 1649 to authorise the sale of Crown lands, including those of held in the right of the duchy of Lancaster.1 In Staffordshire the lands included Needwood forest, which formed part of the duchy’s honor of Tutbury in the east of the county. Forests were at first excluded from general sales, and it was not until1654 that an order was made to inclose it and parcel the land out for sale: the process met with strong local resistance and had still not been completed at the Restoration. Vested inalienably in the Crown under an Act of 1696, the forest survived until 1801 when it was at last disafforested and inclosed.2 The present writer has already provided some of the background documentation — parliamentary surveys of the forest and its constituent parks made in 1649 and 1650,3 and a petition against inclosure presented to Oliver Cromwell in 16554 — and the purpose of this article is to discuss the abortive inclosure, concentrating on the reasons behind the resistance and the strategies applied by the opponents