ABSTRACT
The Bury Abbey woods are one of the three great series of well-documented woods in eastern England, the others being the woods of the bishopric of Ely and of Norwich Cathedral. Natural woodland, especially in this relatively poorly wooded region, was a valuable resource, conserved and managed to produce a perpetual succession of crops of underwood and timber. This attitude to woodland seems already to have been well established in Anglo-Saxon times near the centre of the Abbey’s territory. On the more outlying estates woodland was not quite so actively conserved: much of it disappeared in the 12th and 13th centuries, although what then remained was preserved. Many of the Abbey’s estates, especially in Breckland, had no woodland. A few of the woods were made into parks and used as deer-farms. About 38 of the 150 or so Abbey woods still exist.
