Congratulations to the Wychwood Forest Project. This Sunday it will hold its 11th annual Forest Fair on land it has recently acquired on the edge of Witney, upon which it plans to plant a community wood.

The fair has become a popular event for people living within the bounds of the old Royal Hunting Forest which, for at least 700 years, covered much of West Oxfordshire and is still, of course, present — if only in spirit — in the names of Milton, Ascott and Shipton-under-Wychwood.

But the paradox here is that the event to some degree commemorates a privatisation Act of Parliament far more drastic — at least for the people then living in this part of the county — than any of the present government’s plans to transfer economic power from the public to the private sector.

I refer to the act, passed in 1853, to disafforest and enclose Wychwood. The Act led to the cutting down of trees — and slaughtering of deer — over an area of about 3,750 acres upon which people had been wont to graze their livestock or otherwise eke out a living: legally on areas of common; or, more controversially, illegally by poaching, or by grazing animals on land where, strictly speaking, they should not have done so.

Much of the thinking in the years leading up to the uprooting and enclosure of the forest stems from agricultural reformer Arthur Young who in 1809 published a book called A General View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire; in it he strongly advocated the forest’s destruction and the subsequent transfer of the land into private hands for the benefit of the public at large.

According to Kate Tiller, reader in local history at Oxford University’s department of Continuing University, writing in the excellent Discovering Wychwood (published in 2000 by The Wychwood Press): “Young seems to see no contradiction in realising the public good by creating private property.”

He wrote: “The object hereby is to make a large tract of land productive to the public.” He added: “This would take place on it being made private property, in whatever hands it might be placed.”

And he went on: “There are no circumstances (the mere pleasure of wandering alone excepted) which may not be fully compensated, by the solid and valuable consideration of allotments.”

How wrong he was here, incidentally, since in the event disafforestation resulted in more people emigrating from West Oxfordshire to distant lands than from any other part of Britain except Cornwall.

But it seems that his underlying concern was about the morals of people allowed to wander the forest so freely.

He wrote: “The vicinity is filled with poachers, deerstealers, thieves, and pilferers of every kind; offences of almost every description abound so much, that the offenders are a terror to all quiet and well- disposed persons; Oxford gaol would be uninhabited were it not for this fertile source of crimes.”

The three feasts held in the forest were a particular target for 19th-century moral crusaders such as Young. These three feasts were the Whitsun Feast held at Capp’s Lodge near Burford and abandoned in 1827 thanks to the efforts of a zealous curate concerned about “gross improprieties”; the Whit Hunt in Chase Wood, near the field in which this year’s Forest Fair is to be held, which became famous for fights between rival villages and ceased to exist in 1850; and, of course, the Forest Fair — which was set up in 1796 as a non-conformist fair in the wake of the open-air preaching of the Wesley bothers, to counter the rowdy disorder of the other fairs. It was abandoned in 1856.

Here’s wishing this year’s modern-day fair all the best. Surely planting trees in England, which has fewer trees per acre than any other European country with the exception of Ireland, is a laudable thing to do, and let’s hope that local authority funding for the Wychwood Forest Project will be safe from the coming cuts in public spending.