Inglewood Forest

Inglewood is not an invented fairyland. It was a genuine royal forest in Cumberland, stretching roughly twenty miles between Penrith and Carlisle along the valley of the River Eden, with the fells of the Lake District rising to the west. In medieval law a "forest" was not simply woodland: it was a hunting preserve where the king's deer and boar were protected by special courts and savage penalties, a landscape of oak groves, open moor, and marsh reserved for the chase. Henry II and his successors hunted there, and the forest courts that governed Inglewood left records of poachers, foresters, and verderers across four centuries. When the poets of the north of England began writing Arthurian romances in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they did not send their knights to some vague dream-country. They sent them into the forest outside their own doors, and Inglewood became the wild half of the Arthurian world, the green and dangerous counterpart to Camelot's order.

The forest's most chilling hour comes in the alliterative poem The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, "The Adventures of Arthur at Tarn Wadling," composed around the early fifteenth century. Arthur and his court ride out to hunt in Inglewood, horns blowing and greyhounds running, and the queen Guinevere rests with Sir Gawain, the king's courteous nephew and finest knight, on the bank of Tarn Wadling, a real lake near the village of High Hesket. Suddenly the daylight darkens as if midnight has fallen at noon, and from the depths of the tarn rises a ghost: a bare, blackened corpse with fire on its face, clattering its bones and wailing. It is the spirit of Guinevere's own mother, once the fairest woman alive, now damned for the sin of lust and covetousness. She warns Guinevere to soften her pride, tells Gawain that his famed prowess will fail him, and foretells the fall of Arthur and the Round Table before begging for thirty trentals of masses to ease her torment. Then she sinks back into the black water, and the daylight returns as if nothing has happened.

The same poem shows Inglewood's other face: chivalric challenge. Before the hunt ends, a knight named Sir Galeron of Galloway, a Scottish warrior whose lands Arthur has given to Gawain, rides to the tarn and demands combat for his stolen inheritance. The two knights joust through the forest until Guinevere kneels and begs her husband to end the fight. Arthur rules that Gawain shall return the lands, and Galeron is made a knight of the Round Table, reconciliation bought at the edge of the haunted water. In one afternoon Inglewood hosts both a sermon from beyond the grave and a trial by combat, which is exactly why the romancers loved it: the forest was the one place where the rules of the court bent toward the supernatural.

Inglewood's most famous inhabitant, however, is a woman. In The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, written around 1450, Arthur hunts a great hart alone through the forest and, at the moment of the kill, is seized by Sir Gromer Somer Joure, a giant knight in armour who accuses the king of wrongfully giving his lands to Gawain. Gromer spares Arthur's life on one condition: the king must return in a year, alone, with the true answer to the riddle of what women most desire, or lose his head. Arthur and Gawain ride out with books of answers and fill them with guesses, but none satisfies. Then, deep in Inglewood, Arthur meets Dame Ragnelle, the foulest lady ever described in English verse: a broad face running with snot, a mouth like a mastiff's, boar's tusks, and one eye higher than the other, riding a fine palfrey hung with gold. She is Gromer's own sister, and she offers the true answer - that women desire sovereignty, the power to choose for themselves - on condition that Gawain marries her. Gawain agrees out of loyalty, the answer saves the king, and on their wedding night, alone in the chamber, Ragnelle turns to her husband as a woman of breathtaking beauty. Her stepmother had cursed her to be foul until the best knight in England wedded her and gave her mastery of her own body, and Gawain, letting her choose whether to be fair by day or by night, gives her that mastery and breaks the spell forever.

The forest keeps its hold in other romances too. Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle brings Gawain to the rough castle of a northern giant near Carlisle, at the forest's edge, where courtesy tames violence. The Avowyng of Arthur sets a great boar hunt in Inglewood, where the sharp-tongued steward Sir Kay vows to slay the beast single-handed. And the real forest carried on beneath the fiction: its oaks were felled for ships and fuel, its deer parks were broken up, and by the seventeenth century it had ceased to be a forest in law. Tarn Wadling shrank as its marsh was drained, Castle Hewin crumbled to earthworks, and the riding of the romances passed into the landscape itself.