The New Forest Commoners’ Defence Association was founded in 1909 in response to the increasing conflict between the spreading urban populations around the New Forest’s fringes and the commoners’ animals. It has always insisted on full consultation with the commoners over issues which concern their stock and their livelihood.

Over the intervening years the Association has fought many battles on behalf of its membership’s right to depasture its stock on the open grazing of the New Forest. As early as the 1920’s the Association actively petitioned the Office of Woods (precursor of the Forestry Commission which presently manages the Forest) to improve drainage on the open Forest. And it paid for the installation of telephones in the homes of the agisters, so that animals injured in the increasing toll of road accidents, could be dispatched more quickly.

In 1949, the Association pressed for the introduction of the Tuberculosis Testing Scheme in the Forest, so that by 1956 the New Forest became the first area on the English mainland in which all herds had gained attested status on a voluntary basis.

But as development in the countryside around the Forest become more intense, the straying of animals away from the common grazings was causing increasing hostility between commoners and local landowners and householders. This, coupled with the terrible toll of animal deaths on the unfenced roads of the Forest, as well as beyond its boundaries, meant that measures had to be taken to confine stock within the Forest’s perambulation and protect them from the most dangerous of the roads which cross the Forest.The N.F.C.D.A. lent its support to the campaign to grid and fence the Forest which resulted in an Act of Parliament in 1964.

Throughout the past 30 years, the Association has struggled to defend the Forest from development, to protect its livestock from the growing volume of traffic on the unfenced roads and project the commoner’s point of view in day-to-day Forest management, as well as the political future of the New Forest. Its campaigning has been crucial in the shelving of a proposed Lyndhurst bypass across the open Forest, a 40 m.p.h. speed limit on all unfenced Forest roads, and the development of reflective collars for ponies.

Most recently the Association has expressed its opposition to the conferring of National Park status on the Crown lands of the New Forest. This, it believes, will undermine the powers of the Verderers and place the management of the Forest firmly in the hands of local politicians and national interests groups.