The Maun is one of the several rivers that wind their way through the landscape of the greater Sherwood Forest. As in Anglo-Saxon times, this land is inhabited and cultivated, though more densely and intensively today.
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The Norman Conquest placed the land in the hands of foreign kings and their followers. The Saxon peasantry became the subjects of their new feudal overlords.
These dispossessed serfs found themselves the inhabitants of a Sherwood that became in a few, short decades, the playground and larder of the rich and powerful. And so it remained for hundreds of years.
Writing in 1831, Samuel Lewis describes how:
The whole soil of the forest is understood to have been granted from the crown to different lords of manors, reserving only what is called in forest language the “vert and venison,” or trees and deer…
Reserved, that is, for the monarch; not for the consumption of his or her subjects. In the middle ages especially, penalties for deer poaching and numerous other forest-related felonies were brutal and enforced rigorously.
By the reign of William IV, the need to feed the growing towns and cities of the newly-industrialized Midlands was driving the deforestation and cultivation of large tracts of the Royal Forest.
Lewis observed that:
The deer, which were all of the red kind, though formerly numerous, are now in consequence of the advance of cultivation over their sylvan haunts entirely, expirated.
(A Topographical Dictionary of England)
By the early years of the Victorian period, however, John Curtis was able to paint a more optimistic picture. In A Topographical History of Nottinghamshire (1844) he records how the fertility of arable land between Clipstone and Edwinstowe had been improved by a flood canal built by the Duke of Portland:
“…by this contrivance one of the first, and perhaps most capricious elements of vegetable nutrition, is placed under human control; a deficiency of rain can at all times be amply supplied by sluices and floodgates, and by the gradual slope of the meadows, any occasional redundance is carried off by the natural channel of the Maun.”
Today, much of this rolling, lowland landscape remains under cultivation, irrigated by water pumped from the Maun, and the other rivers and waterways of Sherwood.
