From Lydney a drive of a few miles through pleasant ups and downs of woodland and field, brings us to Whitemead Park, the official residence of the Verderer, Philip Baylis. The title "Verderer" is Norman, indicating the administration of all that relates to the "Vert" or "Greenery" of the Forest; that is, of the timber, the enclosures, the roads, and the surface generally. The Verderer's Court is held at the "Speech House," to which we shall presently come: but the Forest of Dean is also a mineral district, and the Miners have a separate Court of their own. That some of their customs go back to a very remote antiquity we may well believe when we find the scale of which the Romans worked iron in the Forest; a scale so great that with their imperfect method of smelting with Catalan furnaces, etc., so much metal was left in the Roman cinder that it has been sought after all the way down to within the present generation as a source of profit; and in the time of Edward I., one-fourth of the king's revenue from this Forest was derived from the remelted Roman refuse.
I have a beautiful Denarius of Hadrian which was found in the old Roman portion of the Lydney-Park Iron Mine in 1854, with a number of other silver coins, some of them earlier in date; but when we speak of the "mines," the very ancient ones in the Forest were rather deep quarries than what would now be termed mines. As we drive along we now and then notice near the roadside, nearly hidden by the dense foliage of the bushes, long dark hollows, which are locally known as "scowles," another Celtic word meaning gorges or hollows; something like ghyll in the Lake District, "Dungeon Ghyll," and so on. These were Roman and British Hematite mines. If we had been schoolboys I would have taken Senator Hoar down into a scowl and we should both have come back with our clothes spoiled, and our arms full of the splendid hartstongue ferns that cover the sides and edges of the ravine. But they are dangerous places for any but miners or schoolboys; and I shrank from encouraging an enthusiastic American to risk being killed in a Roman pit, even with the ideal advantage of afterwards being buried with his own ancestors in England! So I said but little about them.
The Miners' Court is presided over by another government officer, called the "Gaveller"; from a Celtic word which means holding; as in the Kentish custom of "Gavelkind."* These courts are held in "Saint Briavels" (pronounced "Brevels") Castle: a quaint old building of the thirteenth century, on the western edge of the Forest, where it was placed to keep the Welsh in check. It looks down on a beautiful reach of the river Wye at Bigswear; and it was just on this edge that Wordsworth stood in 1798, when he thought out his "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey," etc.
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters; and again I hear
These waters rolling from their mountain springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs.
Senator Hoar will recall the scene from the railway below: the
"Plots of cottage ground" that "lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses";
and he will say how exactly the words describe
These hedge-rows; hardly hedge-rows; little lines
Of sportive wood run wild,
for they cover yards in width in some places, as he will remember my pointing out to him. The castle is placed on the outside of the Forest and close on the Wye, to guard what was seven centuries ago the frontier of Wales; and the late William Philip Price (Commissioner of Railways and for many years member of Parliament for Gloucester) told me that when he was a boy the Welsh tongue was still spoken at Landogo, the next village down the river, midway between Bigswear and Tintern.
[Footnote]
* I suspect "Gaffer," the English equivalent of "Boss," may be
the same root: i. e., the taker or contractor.
[End of Footnote]