ham Arm Canal Society was established to press for its rebuilding.
LANDCSAPE AND SETTLEMENT
The Impact of Whittlewod.
The pattern of settlement and land usage in Wicken has been considerably influenced by the position of the parish at the southern edge of Whittlewood Forest. Although in 1289 a proposal to reinclose the park at Wick Hamon was investigated by a swainmote court presided over by John de Tingewick, keeper of Whittlewood, implying that the township then lay within the forest, (fn. 32) the detailed perambulation made ten years later, which established the boundary of the forest until the 17th century, clearly places both Wick Hamon and Wick Dive outside Whittlewood. (fn. 33) In 1639, as part of Charles I's attempts to enlarge the forest far beyond the traditional limits, Henry Lord Spencer, the rector and two freeholders were fined for a grant of disafforestation relating to 1,800 a. of land in Wicken and Leckhampstead, and 100 a. of wood in the latter parish. (fn. 34) In reality, as an early 17th-century map of Whittlewood makes clear, no part of either parish was properly within the forest, whose south-western boundary at that date, as in 1299, was marked by Kings Brook. (fn. 35)
A good deal of woodland survived at the northern end of Wicken in the early 17th century, extending over the border into Leckhampstead, most of which was still in existence a century later. (fn. 36) By the early 19th century Wicken Wood had been slightly further reduced in size, although there were still 236 a. of woodland in the parish as a whole, including several parcels to the south-west of the village, detached from the main area further north. Even as late as this, Sir Charles Mordaunt, the owner of the Wicken Park estate, successfully claimed an 18 ft. freeboard along much of the parish boundary with Leckhampstead (including some stretches that were no longer wooded on the Wicken side as well as those that were). (fn. 37) The claim was also accepted by the Ordnance Survey in the 1880s, which accounts for the unusual me