In Hampshire, England, there’s a park called the New Forest that’s not very new at all. It goes back to William the Conqueror (who was in charge 1066-1087), and was a “royal forest.” In the Domesday Book in 1086, it was called “Nova Foresta.” It was used for royal hunts — of deer, for example — but also was a place where anybody could let their own animals graze if they didn’t own any land. You have to pay a fee for that, but it’s actually the predecessor of the “town commons” found in many early New England settlements; places where anybody’s sheep or goats could be pastured.
But more to the point, the New Forest features in several very old words that are still in use, but are now pretty rare. The first is “thegn” — a thegn is somebody who works for the king and owns land, but is slightly below an “earl” in rank. Most of the thegns in that era had been granted land because of their military service, and the land they were granted was in the area of Hampshire. The borders of the New Forest, when it was initially established, were partly dictated by where the thegns’ land was.
Once you have a national park, you need to have some park rangers to be in charge of it. So the position of “agister” was created. The Agisters were responsible for overseeing the pasturing of animals in the New Forest, and assessing the grazing fees.
“Agister” comes from the Old French word “giste”, which meant “lodging. The agisters are still there in the New Forest, and the word “agister” is still there in English, although you don’t run across it very often. “Agist” is also a current word; it refers to the fees you pay for letting your animals graze on somebody else’s land. In Australia and New Zealand, you can have your horse cared for full time at a horse farm, and that’s “full agistment.” If you only want the grazing rights but you’ll take care of the horse yourself, that’s “part agistment.”
Pasturing of animals wasn’t the only right that the common people had in the New Forest. They were also allowed to harvest peat from bogs for fuel, dig out clay for making pottery, gather firewood, and during certain periods of the year, let their pigs go in to eat acorns. Pigs love acorns, but acorns can be poisonous to horses and cattle if they eat too many. Thus there was a certain amount of complexity to scheduling when the different animals were allowed in. That, along with riding around the forest to make sure things were generally in order, was the job of the “verderers.”
The verderers are another set of park rangers, but instead of managing the pastures and collecting grazing fees, they manage the forests and hand out tickets for offenses like hunting deer (only the king was allowed to do that), cutting down the wrong trees, and the like. Like the agisters, the verderers are still around. “Verderer” comes from the Latin word for the color green, “viridis.” The original form of “verderer” was the simpler “verder”, but around 1700 or so the extra “er” was added for some reason. Their basic job is protecting the forest’s “vert” (the vegetation) and the “venison” (the habitat, not the deer meat specifically).
The verderers today are elected by a pretty arcane system from among people who live in (or at least own land in) the New Forest. You can own land in the New Forest, by the way, and even live there. By the time William the Conqueror created the thing, there were already people there — even villages — and for the most part they just stayed put.
The New Forest verderers don’t actually ride horses around the forest nowadays — for one thing there are only five of them — and most of the time what they do is “hold court” where anybody can go talk to them about any New Forest issues of note. I’m not sure what those issues might be, nor what the verderers can do about them. Maybe hand out tickets.
