Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

Gloucester, down till the Norman time, and after, was the great manufactory of the iron brought from the Forest of Dean. The metal was brought up the Severn by barges, to the quay which stood at the road running straight down from Longsmith Street (in which Charles Hoar's house stands), and buried under all this street we find the cinder and slag of the Roman forges. In Domesday book (which was ordered to be drawn up at a Parliament in Gloucester in 1083) it states that the City had paid to the King (i. e., Edward the Confessor) ten dicres of iron yearly. This is very remarkable, for a dicre was three dozen rods or bars; so that the whole tribute was three hundred and sixty bars, or one bar per day for the Druid year of three hundred and sixty days.*

[Footnote] * For more than a century after Julius Caesar had altered the year to three hundred and sixty-five days, the Roman soldiers were still paid at the ancient rate of three hundred and sixty days only, losing the rest as "terminalia," or days not counted as belonging to the year! The proof of this is that in the time of Domitian a soldier's year's pay divided by three hundred and sixty gives an even number of ases. [End of Footnote]

And now we come back to the Verderer's Court at the Speech House with a clear reason for its being held "every forty days at twelve o'clock at noon."

Forty days was the ninth of the Druid year of three hundred and sixty, and was a period of five weeks of eight days each, but which according to the ancient method of counting were called "nine-days." And the reason the Court sits "at Twelve o'clock at noon" is because the Druid day began at noon. Even now, within ten miles of where I write, the children on Minchinhampton Common, on the Cotteswold hills, keep up "old May Day," which was the opening of the Druid year, though they are ignorant of this. Boys and girls arm themselves on that day with boughs of the beech, and go through certain games with them; but exactly as the clock strikes twelve they throw them away, under pain of being stigmatized as "May fools!"

Well has Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, that "All things are in all things!" Even this commonplace list of Court days in the Forest of Dean becomes a beautiful poem when the light of such a past shines on it; just as the veriest dust of the Krakatoan volcano evolves itself into every color of the rainbow when it rises into the sunset sky.

Since writing this paper I find that Philip Baylis, the Verderer of the Forest of Dean, has kindly sent three or four dozen of young oak trees from the Government plantations, to Washington, in order that they may be planted there and in some other places in the United States, to begin the century with. The State Department of Agriculture has arranged for the planting of these oaks, and the periodical record of their measurements, so that a valuable basis will be established for an experiment that may be carried on for a century, or more; and we, the archaeologists of the nineteenth century, shall have wiped away the stigma implied in the old Aberdeen Baillie's remark, that as Posteerity had never done anything for us, we ought not to do anything for posteerity!

The Earl of Ducie has sent, accompanying these Forest of Dean oaks, four small plants, seedlings from the great Chestnut Tree on his Estate at Tortworth; the largest and oldest of its sort in Great Britain. It measures forty-nine feet round the trunk.

Leaving the Speech House for Coleford and Newland we descend a steep hill for half a mile, and crossing the rail at the Station we begin to ascend the opposite rise through the woods. As the carriage climbs slowly up we keep on the lookout for the margin-stones of the Roman paving which here and there show through the modern metaled surface—pieces fifteen to twenty inches long by about five inches in thickness, and set so deep in the ground that eighteen hundred years' wear has never moved them. They are buttressed on the outer edge by similar blocks set four or five inches lower, and themselves forming one side of the solidly paved water-way or gutter which was constructed as part of every such road on a steep gradient, to secure it from abrasion by flood or sudden rush from heavy rainfall. There are many excellent examples of this in the Forest of Dean. We are on the watch, however, for some part where the "margines" remain on both sides of the way. At last we come upon such a place, and alighting from the carriage we strain the tape measure across at two or three points. The mean we find to be thirteen feet and seven inches. As the Roman foot was just over three per cent. less than ours, this means that the Romans built the road here for a fourteen-foot way. So far as I have examined their roads they were always constructed to certain standard widths—seven feet, nine feet, eleven feet, thirteen feet, fourteen feet, or fifteen feet.

It is not too much to say that most of the main roads in England are Roman; but the very continuity of their use has caused this to be overlooked. All the old roads in the Forest of Dean have been pronounced by the Ordnance Surveyors, after close examination, to bear evidences of Roman paving, although for some centuries since then wheel carriages went out of use here!

There is a vivid description in Statius of the making of an imperial-road through such another Forest (if not indeed this very one!) especially worth recalling here, because it was written at very nearly the period of the building of this track over which we are journeying; i. e., near the end of the first century.