Forests were legal institutions introduced by the Normans to denote an area where the King or another magnate had the right to keep and hunt deer and make Forest Law.
Initially there was a very weak correlation between the extent of the legal forest and what might be termed the 'physical forest', the often wooded Common Land areas where the deer lived.
Outside those areas woodland cover would have been modest, particularly near the Roding and Lea rivers.
Waltham Forest was bounded by the River Lea in the west and the originally Roman Romford Road (A118) in the south.
The modern London Borough of Waltham Forest, formed in 1965, was named after this institution.