Good news locally. Newcastle-under-Lyme council is set to plant 850 lime trees by 2023, on their now-derelict council golf course at Keele. The planting is being pitched as a key part of a ‘new Lyme’ forest, named after the ancient forest now long-gone, and other sites are also being planted (but not with limes). Similar large planting schemes are underway in Stoke-on-Trent, and there is also a large private planting of native woodland in Eccleshall, and along the HS2 route.

The Lyme is one of a half-dozen local ancient forests discussed in detail in the new “The Forests and Elite Residences of the Earls of Chester in Cheshire, c. 1070–1237” (The Des Seal Memorial Lecture), in Anglo-Norman Studies XLIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2020. Sadly this is paywalled at JSTOR but it is of obvious importance for any tracing of the Gawain journey from North Wales to the Staffordshire Moorlands, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I can get enough of the Anglo-Norman Studies article to summarise a bit, re: the Lyme. It suggests Lyme does not actually mean “lime trees”, but most likely comes from the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold (of a house)’ or ‘boundary line’. The Lyme was a dense belt of protective forest running along the Cheshire / north Staffordshire / Shropshire border, some 50 miles long and augmented by impassable Cheshire mere-bogs and high escarpments that rise as the Cheshire Plain meets Staffordshire. Difficult to trace today, but the monk Lucian of Chester (monk of St. Werburgh) mentioned it (possibly c. 1195) as “(Cestra provincia) Lime nemoris (limite lateraliter clausa)”. Later others talk of it, including a Shrewsbury charter which knew it as “nemus quod Lima dicitur”. Through the dark wood of the Lyme passed all the passable routes from Cheshire into north Staffordshire. The forest probably linked strategically with other protective forests that lay between the Dee and the Peak, which the article also discusses.

I now speculate a little. If it dates from pre-Norman times must be unknown, unless pollen archaeology might one day shed some light on that. Lucian’s text is available in a 1912 scholarly reprint and he is said by the Latin-reading editor to be keen to give credit to his lord for creating the Lyme. Yet such a landscape-work is one of many generations, and his Lord may only have put things in order and filled in gaps of some earlier Mercian version of the Lyme. That would be my guess, but just a guess.

What we can be sure of is that from the Lyme the local places of Audlem and Burslem partly take their names. Though this does not mean that the Lyme once flowed directly around the foot of the hill and churchyard of Burslem. It would be more likely that it was way over toward Red Street and Bignall Hill, thick and thorny on the slopes and banks running down to the Cheshire Plain. Though thinning woodland may have stretched back from there, perhaps as far as the western lip of the Fowlea Valley opposite Burslem, which would make Bradwell Woods a relic. Thus Burslem would have lain some way SE of the Lyme, but near enough to take its placename (‘Burgweard’s Lyme’) from it. What Lyme might have meant to Burgweard, if it ever had a tree-ish meaning, we can’t know. But one placename study suggests ‘Elm’ as a possible meaning for ‘Lyme’. In which case the Lyme forest would have been rather tall, since elms are very big trees.

The obvious enemy that the Lyme might be defending the English heartlands against were raiding incursions from North Wales and Ireland. In total it probably formed a wide 55-mile arc from Market Drayton in Shropshire through north Staffordshire and south-east Cheshire to near Ashton-under-Lyme in Lancashire. So far as I know no-one has ever tried to map its likely spread, with reference to relic woodland and suitable terrain. An interesting ‘retirement project’ for someone, perhaps.