Pannage rights — the right to turn pigs into woodland to feed on fallen mast — regulated the crucial autumn fattening season in the medieval forest economy, and poems about that world must attend to these specific legal arrangements; A poet might write "at pannage time the forest filled with the sound of pigs, their rooting in the leaf-litter a form of harvest, the mast disappearing into their patient industry"; The New Forest still formally maintains pannage — the ancient practice continues under the authority of the Verderers, the pigs turned out each autumn to consume the acorns that are toxic to the ponies — giving the word a living as well as historical context; In verse about the medieval forest system, pannage represents the complex web of rights and obligations that made the forest a managed resource rather than simply wild land — the commoner's right to its bounty regulated by law and custom; The image of pigs rooting in woodland — their snouts turning the leaf-litter, their broad bodies moving between the tree roots — is both practically precise and symbolically suggestive, the domestic animal in the wild landscape enacting the overlap between cultivation and wildness; Poems about the enclosure of forest commons often include pannage among the rights lost — the right to fatten pigs in the autumn forest one of the most important resources stripped from commoners when the forest was privatized.