Already by A.D. 675 persecution of wildlife had reached a pitch which led St. Cuthbert to establish on his Fame Island retreat off the Northumberland coast the oldest of European sanctuaries, which is maintained with loving vigilance at this day. Loss of wilderness was one of the urgent problems which faced King William the Conqueror when he inaugurated his new administration in 1066. He anticipated the American National Parks by establishing a series of Royal Forests to conserve some of the last substantial remnants of English wilderness.
These Royal Forests were closely and accurately demarcated, and on the whole vigilantly and efficiently administered, under a code of law and management designed to con-serve not only the deer and other wildlife but the habitat, or "vert" as it was called. Some of the penalties for infringement have been modernized, but in the New Forest of some 65,000 acres Crown management for conservation has been continuous over nearly nine centuries, and during the past two years the Nature Conservancy, by agreement with the Forestry Com-mission, has undertaken nature protection duties in this ancient reserve.
It gave us great pleasure last June that several leading American conservationists were able to walk through it, with a number of ours, in commemoration of the historic walk along the same route fifty years earlier by Theodore Roosevelt and Edward Grey, just at the time when the great American conservation movement was springing to fame.
Unfortunately, apart from the New Forest and Wychwood Forest—now a National Nature Reserve—nearly all our original series of officially conserved national areas have been filched away and destroyed by those encroaching interests which, like jackals and hyenas, are always hanging around the shadows waiting their char to supersede trusteeship by exploitation.
E. M. Nicholson, speaking on Great Britain's Nature Conservancy at RFF's 1961 Forum.
A version of this article appeared in print in the June 1961 issue of Resources magazine.
