oakday | herewardthewake

Hereward Oak Day - Sunday 21 December 2025 • 11 am – 3 pm

At the ancient Bowthorpe Oak, Bowthorpe Park Farm, Manthorpe, Bourne PE10 0JZ
FREE – bring the family

The Oak and the Outlaw

England’s soul has always lived in the oak.

For the Anglo-Saxons the oak was the king-tree: sacred to Thunor, the thunder-god; the place where kings were crowned beneath spreading boughs; the timber that built ships, halls, and churches. Peter Ackroyd calls the oak “the very emblem of England, rooted in the soil, enduring through centuries of storm and war”. Its gnarled trunk is our national portrait: weathered, defiant, ancient, and still alive.

On 21 December 2025 we gather beneath the Bowthorpe Oak, Britain’s widest-girthed living oak (over 40 feet in circumference and more than 1,000 years old), to honour two intertwined pieces of our heritage: the oak itself, and the outlaw who once walked its shade: Hereward the Wake.

A Thousand-Year Witness

When Hereward was exiled just before Christmas 1062, the Bowthorpe Oak was already a giant. When he returned in 1067 to defend his homeland, its roots drank the same fen-edge water that fed his ploughlands. When he vanished into the greenwood in 1071, its branches still sheltered the memory.

This is no ordinary tree. It stood in the heart of the great Brunneswald (or Bruneswald), the dark oak-wood that once rolled unbroken from Bourne south-west into Northamptonshire, touching the royal hunting forests of Rockingham and Salcey. A sea of oak, ash, and hazel, threaded by deer paths and charcoal-burners’ tracks, it was the wild lung of medieval Lincolnshire: timber for Peterborough’s new abbey, acorns for abbey swine, cover for rebels.

Domesday Book (1086) records Hereward himself as lord of the very manors that surrounded this oak:

Witham on the Hill (with its berewicks Manthorpe, Toft, and Lound)
Acres of ploughland, broad meadows along the Glen, and 80 acres of woodland

Stand beneath the Bowthorpe Oak today and you stand on Hereward’s land, among the last living fragment of the great forest that once hid him.

Hereward Oak Day – 21 December 2025

963 years to the day since Hereward’s exile, we invite you to meet the legend beneath the tree that knew him.

Rory Gibson returns as Hereward the Wake in full 11th-century war-gear, telling tales of exile, rebellion, and the last stand against the Conqueror.
David Maile (founder of the WakeHereward Project) shares the latest discoveries about Hereward’s Domesday lands right here.
Touch the oak that has watched a thousand winters.
Bring the children – free entry, no booking needed.

Warm clothes, sturdy boots, and a camera – the oak and the outlaw are waiting.

Bowthorpe Oak – where England’s oldest tree keeps watch over England’s last rebel.

WakeHereward Project
herewardthewake.co.uk/oakday

Brunneswald Forest (also spelled Brunneswold) is an ancient tract of forest mentioned in the Gesta Herwardi and other chronicles as a key location associated with the post-1071 exploits of the Anglo-Saxon outlaw Hereward.

Key facts about the forest:

Historical Reality: Brunneswald was a real historical forest area, not a fictional one, although the tales associated with Hereward's time there are a mix of fact and legend.
Location: It was an "ancient tract of forest" located in the English Midlands, specifically near the towns of Huntingdon and Stamford. Hereward's traditional birthplace of Bourne in Lincolnshire was also nearby, within the general fenland region where he operated.
Context in Gesta Herwardi: Geffrei Gaimar's L'Estoire des Engleis reports on Hereward's activities within this forest area after the fall of the Isle of Ely to William the Conqueror's forces in 1071. This contrasts with the main Gesta Herwardi narrative, which focuses on the Fens as his primary base of resistance.
Significance: The forest provided a sanctuary and base of operations for Hereward and his band of disinherited English thegns (noblemen) from where they continued their resistance against the Norman regime. This area, often referred to more generally as a "greenwood" in later literature, represented a place of freedom and community for outlaws in contrast to the Norman-controlled, cultivated southern regions.