Philip Baylis showed us some of the old parchments connected with the Mine Court; one document especially precious being a copy of the "Book of Denys," made in the time of Edward III. It sets forth the ancient customs which formed the laws of the miners. At this point the Verderer had to settle some matter of the instant, but he put us under the care of a young man who acted as our guide to one of the ancient and giant oaks of the Forest, on the "Church Hill" enclosure, about three-quarters of a mile up the hill above the Park. Nicholls ("History of the Forest of Dean," page 20) thinks the name Church Hill comes from the setting apart of some land here for the Convent of Grace Dieu to pay for masses for the souls of Richard II., his ancestors and successors.
It was a steep climb; and the evening twilight was coming on apace as we followed the little track to the spot where the old oak rises high above the general level of the wood, reminding one of Rinaldo's magical myrtle, in "Jerusalem Delivered":
O'er pine, and palm, and cypress it ascends;
And towering thus all other trees above
Looks like the elected queen and genius of the grove!
Only that for an oak of similar standing we must say "king" instead of "queen"; emblem as it is of iron strength and endurance.
It is not so much the girth of the tree as its whole bearing that impresses a beholder; and I do not think either of us will forget its effect in the gloom and silence and mystery of the gathering night.
Resisting a kindly pressure to stay the night at Whitemead, that we might keep to our programme of sleeping at the Speech House, we started on the last portion of the long day's drive. The road from Parkend, after we have climbed a considerable hill, keeps mostly to the level of a high ridge. It is broad and smooth; and the moonlight and its accompanying black shadows on the trees made the journey one of great beauty; while the mountain air lessened the sense of fatigue that would otherwise have pressed heavily on us after so long a day amid such novel surroundings. The only thing to disturb the solitude is the clank of machinery; and the lurid lights, as we pass a colliery; and then a mile of two more with but the sound of our own wheels and the rhythm of the horses' feet, and we suddenly draw up at an hotel in the midst of the Forest, its quiet well-lighted interior inviting us through the doorway, left open to the cool summer night air. We are at the Speech House. We had bespoken our rooms by wire in the morning: Senator Hoar had a chambre d'honneur, with a gigantic carved four-post bed that reminded him of the great bed of Ware. His room like my "No. 5," looked out over magnificent bays of woodland to the north. The Speech House is six hundred feet above the sea, and the mountain breeze coming through the wide open window, with this wonderful prospect of oak and beech and holly in the moonlight,—the distance veiled, but scarcely veiled, by the mist, suggest a poem untranslatable in words, and incommunicable except to those who have passed under the same spell. We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate. One or two vehicles driving past; now and then the far-off call of owls answering one another in the woods—one of the sweetest sounds in nature—the varying cadence carrying with it a sense of boundlessness and infinite distance; and with it we fall asleep.
If there is anything more beautiful than a moonlight summer night in the heart of the Forest of Dean, it is its transformation into a summer morning, with the sparkle of dew on the grass, and the sunrise on the trees; with the music of birds, and the freshness that gives all these their charm.
As soon as we are dressed we take a stroll out among the trees. In whichever direction we turn we are struck by the abundance of hollies. I believe there are some three thousand full grown specimens within a radius of a mile of the Speech House. This may be due to the spot having been from time immemorial the central and most important place in the Forest. The roads that lead to it still show the Roman paving-stones in many places, as Senator Hoar can bear witness; and the central point of a British Forest before the Roman time would be occupied by a sacred oak. The Forest into which Julius Caesar pursued the Britons to their stronghold, was Anderida, that is, the Holy Oak; from dar, oak (Sanskrit, daru, a tree), and da, good. It is worth remarking that this idea survives in the personal name, Holyoak; for who ever heard of "Holyelm," or "Holyash," or a similar form compounded of the adjective and the name of any other tree than the oak. If there is an exception it is in the name of the holly. The Cornish Celtic word for holly was Celyn, from Celli (or Kelli), a grove; literally a grove-one; so that the holly was probably planted as a grove or screen round the sacred oak. Such a planting of a holly grove in the central spot of the Forest in the Druid time, would account for these trees being now so much more numerous round the Speech House than they are in any other part of the woods. The Saxon name is merely the word holy with the vowel shortened, as in _holi_day; and that the tree really was regarded as holy is shown by the custom in the Forest Mine Court of taking the oath on a stick of holly held in the hand. This custom survived down to our own times; for Kedgwin H. Fryer, the late Town Clerk of Gloucester, told me he had often seen a miner sworn in the Court, touching the Bible with the holly stick! The men always kept their caps on when giving evidence to show they were "Free miners."
The oaks, marked A. B., of whose growth statistics have already been given, stand on the side of the Newnham road opposite the Speech House. The Verderer is carrying on the annual record of their measurements.
We return to the house by the door on the west; the one at which we arrived last evening. It was then too dark to observe that the stone above it, of which I took a careful sketch several years ago, is crumbling from the effects of weather, after having withstood them perfectly for two centuries. The crown on it is scarcely recognizable; and the lettering has all disappeared except part of the R.