In English land law, it was illegal to assart any part of a royal forest without permission.
However, sometimes groups of individuals or even entire villages did the work and the results were divided into strips and shared among tenant farmers.
[1] The cleared land often leaves behind an assart hedge, which often contains a high number of woodland trees such as small leafed lime or wild service and contains trees that rarely colonise planted hedges, such as hazel.
The Black Death in the late 1340s depopulated the countryside and many formerly assarted areas returned to woodland.
[1] Assarting was described by landscape historian Richard Muir as typically being "like bites from an apple" as it was usually done on a small scale but large areas were sometimes cleared.