Did You Earn Windfall Profits, or Were You Caught Red-Handed?

Colloquial expressions are sometimes modern inventions. Think of the expression “going viral.” But just as often they are a thousand years old. Literally. Here are a couple of examples that go back to medieval forest laws.

In Anglo-Saxon England, forests were common areas. Peasants could settle there, hunt, cut wood, use the forest resources for their livelihood.

That changed in 1066 when William the Conqueror earned his nickname by conquering England.

William introduced Norman feudal law, under which the forests belonged to the king or his aristocratic vassals. And not only the land and the trees growing on it, but also the animals that lived in the forest.

In 1079, William reserved the New Forest in southern England as royal property. By 1089, Sherwood Forest – later the legendary home of Robin Hood – was also a royal property.

Forests were important to the feudal economy. In the days before industrial stock farming, a meat packing industry, supermarkets, and refrigerators, feudal aristocrats were constantly hunting to feed their household retainers. The king even more so, because royal households were enormous.

To save all the game for the king and his household, outsiders were absolutely forbidden to hunt in the royal forests.

Penalties for poaching were severe. Judges could hang poachers, but why waste perfectly good peasants? Their labor was needed to farm the estates of the aristocracy. Instead of executing them, poachers were usually branded on their cheeks or foreheads, or mutilated – loss of ears or a nose were the standard penalties.

Legally, it was not necessary to catch a peasant with a deer carcass in order to get a conviction for poaching. It was enough to catch them blood-stained. They were literally “caught red-handed.”

The ban on poaching also extended to trees in the king’s forest. The royal household could cut wood for the fires that heated their drafty castles, but peasants could not. More ears and noses cut off.

There was one exception. Peasants were allowed to go into royal forests and gather any branches that had blown down in windstorms. This “windfall” provided unexpected relief for peasant households living on the outskirts of the king’s forests. To this day, “windfall profits” are unexpected and unusual gains.

Robin Hood, by the way, was considered an "outlaw" – literally someone outside the protection of the law. It was perfectly legal for anyone who met him to kill him without trial. It wasn’t even necessary to catch him red-handed.

Other people would also be barred from offering him food, fuel, or lodging, so he likely made use of windfall from Sherwood Forest for his campfires.