The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 200

but he never forgot his tribal identity. He raised a rebellion in the
urwald , and in ad 9 the wild men he commanded ambushed the
Roman army commanded by Publius Quintilius Varus, which was
marching through the great forest to its winter quarters. The Cherus-
can savages trapped Varus's 25,000 men between swamps and
wildwood, and speared to death all but a handful of the decadent,
complacent empire's troops. From this unlikely victory a compelling
but ultimately lethal myth was born.
From the late fifteenth century onwards, Germans began to portray
themselves as the descendants of wild and natural beings who pur-
sued an uncorrupted existence in a woodland arcadia. By the
mid-eighteenth century, the forests in which Hermann defeated the
civilized Romans began to embody the authentic fatherland - raw,
free and strong.
Wald and Volk - forest and people - were explicitly connected by
Nazi ideologists. In 1941, when the German army launched its attack
on the Soviet Union and overran eastern Poland, Hermann Göring,
commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, seized the Białowieza Forest -
the urwald preserved through the centuries as a royal hunting
estate - and declared it his private property. The government conser-
vation department he had established then set to work to create a vast
national park around the ancient forest, from which the people were
cleared (and many murdered) with customary Nazi cruelty. 15 The land
was rewilded by brute force.
Göring's brutalities in eastern Poland were an extreme form of
what the Normans did in England. Their forest law annexed large
tracts of countryside. 'Forest' meant not a place where trees grew but
a place foris - or outside - the usual rule of law. Elsewhere the use of
the land was often widely shared, but these tracts (some of which
were treeless) were subject to the harsher and less accommodating
demands of the royal hunt. In some cases forest law cleared the inhab-
itants out, in others it curtailed their rights and reduced their living.
Like Göring, William I and his court were obsessed by the chase, and
they saw the capture and creation of new hunting grounds as one
of the perquisites of conquest. The forest laws were brutally extended
by the Black Acts of the eighteenth century, documented in E. P.
Thompson's topic Whigs and Hunters . 16 The new hanging offences