The Lopping Saga

Oxford dictionary of national biography

Willingale, Thomas (1798–1870), labourer and radical, was born at Stanford Rivers, Essex, the son of Joseph and Charlotte Willingale. It is doubtful whether he had any education, since at marriage he could not sign his name; he passed most of his life as an obscure bricklayer, woodman, and gardener. He was by patrimony a freeman and therefore elector of the borough of Maldon. By 1807 he was living in Loughton.

Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, the once extensive forest of Essex had been reduced to a rump through enclosures by adjoining landowners, both large and small, and through efforts by the government to dispose of the crown rights in the forest for cash. Starting in December 1864, the Revd John Whitaker Maitland, lord of the manor of Loughton (one of the parishes remaining most afforested), enclosed for his private profit all the woodland in the parish, amounting to no less than 1300 acres, excluding the public by fencing. He then began clearing the trees, preparatory to conveying the land in building plots.

Willingale, who with other poor men of Loughton lived by pollarding the trees and selling the lopwood for fuel, in pursuance of the ancient rights of the parishioners, objected. On 11 November 1865, by tradition the start of the season, with his sons and a nephew he broke down the fence and lopped as usual, and continued to do so. He was summoned on Maitland's information to Epping court on 8 December 1865: he pleaded the ancient rights, and his case was dismissed by the magistrates. However, on 7 March 1866 magistrates at Waltham Abbey convicted his son Samuel and his nephews Alfred and William of damaging trees. Thomas was not charged on this occasion, probably deliberately. The young men were fined 2s. 6d. with 11s. costs. They declined to pay, and were imprisoned for a week with hard labour. There is no evidence that Willingale himself was ever imprisoned.

After the release of his relatives, with the active aid of the Commons Society, Willingale commenced legal action against Maitland, seeking an injunction against the further felling of trees. An interim injunction was duly obtained, but on 12 October 1866 Maitland got from Waltham Abbey magistrates an order ejecting Willingale from his cottage to be effective on 9 November. There was the offer of rehousing, but undoubtedly the idea was to disrupt the exercise of lopping rights on 11 November, on which date these had to start if their exercise was to continue. Willingale was also denied work by many of the local landowners, and found difficulty in securing a new abode in Loughton. Nevertheless, he pursued the lawsuit with total pertinacity, refusing offers of large sums of money to abandon it, and effectively setting one group of local magnates, E. N. and T. F. Buxton, and Andrew Johnston, who supported him, against another, led by Maitland and the other lords of the manors.

The importance to the conservation movement of Willingale's defiance cannot be overestimated. The four-year stay of execution afforded by the interim injunction allowed the Commons Society to prepare its case, and the corporation of London to be persuaded to start its definitive legal action against the lords of the manors. Willingale's resoluteness may be said to have begun a tradition of militant action against acts deleterious to the environment. Willingale's stand, though doubtless firmly grounded in self-interest and sheer old-fashioned cussedness, was later much embroidered and romanticized, but it was seminal in the open-space movement.

Willingale married Hetty Higgins on 15 October 1838; they had five children who survived beyond infancy. Willingale died on 9 August 1870 at Loughton, before his lawsuit was adjudicated, and was buried in a pauper's grave in St John's churchyard, Loughton. However, he achieved a certain amount of posthumous fame as a ‘village Hampden’: a school and a street were named after him, and the town's public hall, built with the compensation money when the lopping rights were eventually ended after dedication of the forest to public enjoyment, was named the Lopping Hall, and a hornbeam plaque was erected to Willingale's memory. His name was well known enough for Punch, fifty years after the saving of the forest, to summarize the fight of 1865–82 in the lines:
One Willingale of Loughton; blessed be his name …

Willingale a labourer, by lopping of a tree,

Kept houses off the Forest, for men like you and me.


C. C. Pond
Sources ‘Epping Forest’, Punch, 174 (1928), 416 · P. Thompson, ‘The Willingales of Loughton’, Essex Naturalist, 31 (1926), 157–69 [a lecture read to the Essex Field Club, 28 Nov 1925] · W. Addison, Epping forest (1991) · Loughton and District Historical Society, Thompson MSS · census returns, 1851, 1861 · m. cert. · d. cert.