The importance of the family had thus dwindled, but they still retained the old Saxon manor-house, with a couple of farms and a grove large enough to afford
pannage to a hundred pigs--"sylva de centum porcis," as the old family parchments describe it.
Autumn is the season of
Pannage in the New Forest, when pigs (left) are allowed to roam free, eating the green acorns and beech nuts, which are poisonous to the ponies.
During
pannage season, 600 pigs are allowed to roam the forest to protect the native ponies by eating acorns which are poisonous to them.
During
pannage season, hogs run free to graze on acorns and chestnuts, a diet said to improve the quality of their meat.
When acorns, chestnuts and beechmast fall in the New Forest, pigs are allowed out for
pannage. Do your own foraging on Fungi Walks or blow away cobwebs with a clifftop coastal hike.
However, in terms of stewardship of the forest, by leaving these ancient woods as open-wood pasture, it allowed for their traditional usage for the forest economy as shelter and browse for royal deer as well as for providing commons rights for surrounding villages to graze their cattle and access
pannage (eating acorns) for their pigs.
Assart of the forest, rights of agistment, rights of
pannage, estovers of fire, house, cart or hedge, rush, fern, gorze and sedge rights, rights to searwood, to windfalls, to dotards, rights of lops and tops--in all, the overlapping vocabulary of natural and social relations recall a forgotten world, easily romanticized by those first criticizing the simplicities of meum et tuum.
What animals had the right to be pastured in a wood under '
pannage'?
These included the right to have one's livestock pasture and partake of the "common of herbage" for a specified time in the forest (agistment), the right to have one's pigs access acorns and beech mast (
pannage), and the right to wood for fuel, repairs, and other necessities (estovers).
"Traditionally pigs would have been used in the woodland in a system known as
pannage," says John.