A Brief History of Forestry. / In Europe, the United States and Other Countries

by B. E. Fernow

It appears that the oriental kings were exclusive owners of all unappropriated or public forests. This was certainly the case with the princes of India and of Persia, and such ownership can be proved definitely in many other parts, as in the case of the forests of Lebanon, of Cyprus, and of various forest areas in Asia Minor.

That in the Greek republics the forests were mainly public property seems to be likely; for Attica, at least, this is true without doubt.

While the first Roman kings seem to have owned royal domains, which were distributed among the people after the expulsion of the kings, the public property which came to the republic as a result of conquest was in most cases at once transferred to private hands, either for homesteads of colonists, or in recognition of services of soldiers and other public officers, or to mollify the conquered, or by sale, or for rent, not to mention the rights acquired by squatters. The rents were usually farmed out to collectors (publicani) or to corporations formed of these. Livy, however, mentions also State forests in which the cutting was regulated, probably by merely reserving the ship timber.

That occasionally single cities and other smaller municipal units owned forest properties in common seems also established.

Private forest properties connected with farm estates existed in Ethiopia, in Arabia, among the Greeks and among the Romans at home as well as in their colonies. Especially pasture woods (saltus) connected with small and large estates (latifundia) into which probably most forest areas near settlements were turned, are frequently mentioned as in private ownership; but also other private forests existed.

The institution of servitudes or rights of user (usus and usus-fructus) and a considerable amount of law regarding the conditions under which they were exercised and regarding their extinguishment were in existence among the Romans in the first centuries of the Christian era.

3. Forest Use.

Restrictions in the use of woods were not entirely absent, but with the exception of reserving ship timber in the State forests, they refer only to special classes of forest.

In the frontier forests reserved for defensive purposes, timber cutting was forbidden. And in the holy groves set aside by private or public declaration no wood could be cut thereafter, being in the latter case considered nobody’s property but sanctified and dedicated to religious use (res sacra), and whoever removed any wood from them was considered a “patricide,” except the cutting be done for purposes of improvement (thinnings) and after a prescribed sacrifice.

With the extension of Christendom the holy trees and groves became the property of the emperors, who sometimes substituted Christian holiness for the pagan, and retained the restrictions which had preserved them. Thus the cutting and selling of cypress and other trees in the holy grove near Antioch, and of Persea trees in Egypt generally (which had been deemed holy under the Pharaos) was prohibited under penalty of five pounds gold, unless a special permit had been obtained.