[204] Stanley, citing Selden, De Jure Naturali, book vi, and Fabricius, Cod. Pseudap. V. T., i, 874, mentions a remarkable Jewish tradition of uncertain but unquestionably ancient date, which is among the oldest evidences of public respect for the woods, and of enlightened views of their importance and proper treatment:
"To Joshua a fixed Jewish tradition ascribed ten decrees, laying down precise rules, which were instituted to protect the property of each tribe and of each householder from lawless depredation. Cattle, of a smaller kind, were to be allowed to graze in thick woods, not in thin woods; in woods, no kind of cattle without the owner's consent. Sticks and branches might be gathered by any Hebrew, but not cut. * * * Woods might be pruned, provided they were not olives or fruit trees, and that there was sufficient shade in the place."—Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church, part i, p. 271.
[205] There seems to have been a tendency to excessive clearing in Central and Western, earlier than in Southeastern France. Wise and good Bernard Palissy—one of those persecuted Protestants of the sixteenth century, whose heroism, virtue, refinement, and taste shine out in such splendid contrast to the brutality, corruption, grossness, and barbarism of their oppressors—in the Recepte Véritable, first printed in 1563, thus complains: "When I consider the value of the least clump of trees, or even of thorns, I much marvel at the great ignorance of men, who, as it seemeth, do nowadays study only to break down, fell, and waste the fair forests which their forefathers did guard so choicely. I would think no evil of them for cutting down the woods, did they but replant again some part of them; but they care nought for the time to come, neither reck they of the great damage they do to their children which shall come after them."—Œuvres Complètes de Bernard Palissy, 1844, p. 88.
[206] The great naval and commercial marines of Venice and of Genoa must have occasioned an immense consumption of lumber in the Middle Ages, and the centuries immediately succeeding those commonly embraced in that designation. The marine construction of that period employed larger timbers than the modern naval architecture of most commercial countries, but apparently without a proportional increase of strength. The old modes of ship building have been, to a considerable extent, handed down to the present day in the Mediterranean, and an American or an Englishman looks with astonishment at the huge beams and thick planks so often employed in the construction of very small vessels navigating that sea. According to Hummel, the desolation of the Karst, the high plateau lying north of Trieste, now one of the most parched and barren districts in Europe, is owing to the felling of its woods to build the navies of Venice. "Where the miserable peasant of the Karst now sees nothing but bare rock swept and scoured by the raging Bora, the fury of this wind was once subdued by mighty firs, which Venice recklessly cut down to build her fleets."—Physische Geographie, p. 32. See Appendix, [No. 27].
[207] Le Alpi che cingono l'Italia, i, p. 367.
[208] See the periodical Politecnico, published at Milan, for the month of May, 1862, p. 234.
[209] Annali di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio, vol. i, p. 77.
[210] Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i, pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though sea coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in England. It is a question of much interest, when coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am acquainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word græfa by sea coal. I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle, A. D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the twelfth century, and in that passage it may as probably mean peat as coal, and quite as probably something else as either. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Glanville, or in Robert of Gloucester, though all these writers speak of jet as found in England, and are full in their enumeration of the mineral products of the island.
England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Cæsar says it wanted the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat mosses show, is a tree of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now native to that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the "fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Cæsar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinus, pine, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and Kiefer, Fichte, and Tanne are often confounded in German.—Rossmässler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. If it were certain that the abies of Cæsar was the fir formerly and still found in peat mosses, and that he was right in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island.
The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however, exceptions. "Of all in Essex," observes Harrison, Holinshed, i, p. 357, "that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft: for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske; for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to deale without [with our] okes to that end, but not with so good successe as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone be remoued and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time in the salt water."