As a general rule, woodlands (i.e. forests which were not 'forests' in the sense of royal woodlands) were always the personal property of someone in the Middle Ages, even if that someone was not necessarily a lord. Often, of course, woods belonged to kings, lords and other major landholders like churches and monasteries, but they could equally be owned by less important people - minor landowners and rich local peasants (the ratio of small landowner to lords and aristocrats varies wildly over space and time, however). Whoever owned the woodland was always keen to protect and restrict access to them, since they were important economic resources. Hunting is almost never mentioned as an economic activity in this sense - it was almost completely an aristocratic hobby and wasn't very meaningful in terms making money. The class implications associated with hunting too (which are still very present in e.g. British society) meant that anyone who wanted to hunt would have owned their own forests to do it in anyway. So it's very rare to see anyone looking for hunting rights in a specific piece of woodland.

The two main economic uses which people were interested in was in harvesting fire-wood and in pasturing pigs (pigs feed on the nuts and seeds found in the undergrowth). This didn't necessarily mean that the owner of the woods had full control of the rights to these things. In many places, there existed traditional or customary rights which allowed local people to have limited access to local woodland for firewood, pasturage or other uses. It's difficult to quantify these rights, as they seem to have been most widespread in the early Middle Ages, when less documentation was produced and when the documents which were produced were much vaguer. However, from c. 1000, people became much more concerned with defining their rights much more precisely (for a variety of reasons which are still under debate!) and so we can get a much more detailed idea of what was happening in Europe's woods. Rights to the various economic benefits of woodlands were given out and appear to have been tightly controlled or enforced. Exemptions from payment of dues for e.g. pasturing pigs was a common pious gift to local churches, for example, which clearly shows that it was a nice little income for the owner (there's no point in making a gift like that if you're not losing out on anything!). The ferocity with which people pursued disputes over these rights are also a testament to how important they were and how people went about enforcing them. The monks of the abbey of Fleury in central France preserved a story about a local nobleman whose woods bordered their own. The nobleman's pigkeepers kept bringing his pigs into the monks' woods to feed them and wouldn't stop despite repeated complaints. The monks appealed to the local bishop, but he was a personal friend of the nobleman, and so ruled in his favour. In a last ditch effort, the monks agreed to meet in the woods themselves to try to hammer out a solution, but the nobleman fell off his horse on the way to the meeting and died - a clear sign from God (according to the monks who wrote the account) that he had been in the wrong. The importance of the story here is to show how much the encroachment on their woodland meant to the monks, and the lengths they were willing to go to end it.

The end result of these development was a gradual tightening of restrictions on woodland all around, especially as the population increased in the twelfth and thirteenth century. Older, communal rights to woodland use became rarer and more tightly enforced than before and we see more and more conflict over access to and use of woodland. It was clearly big business in the medieval period, and like any big business, it has jealously guarded.