1. West Somerset was separated from East Somerset by wide inland waters: the beds of the Brue and Parret were lakes in the winter, and only passable in summer to those who knew the ground. Pedrida was regarded as a natural limit, like the sea itself, dividing nations; it was spoken of in like phraseology. Thus we read in 658 how Cenwalh warred against the Welsh and drave them even unto Pedrida[34]; and, in 682, how Centwine drave the Bret-Welsh even unto the sea[35].
The cause of that expanse of water and large area of fenland happened far back beyond historical chronology, and we can only date it by using the geological method of reckoning time. Far back in the sub-glacial era a subsidence of the land took place which affected the coast of Somerset and North Devon. Proof of this is found in a submarine forest extending along the south coast of the Severn Sea, which has long been known. ‘That portion of it visible at Porlock was described in 1839 by Sir Henry de la Beche, and more recently by Mr. Godwin Austen in an essay read before the Geological Society in 1865[36].’
Subsequently the Rev. H. H. Winwood and Professor Boyd Dawkins verified the discovery by a thorough examination of the forest-bed. Near Minehead the forest consists of oak, ash, alder, and hazel, which grew on a blue clay. An ancient growth of oak, ash, and yew is found everywhere underneath the peat or alluvium in the Somersetshire levels. Throughout this wide area the trees were destroyed by the growth of peat, or by the deposits of the floods, except at a few isolated spots, which stand at a higher level than usual, in the great flat extending between the Polden Hills and the Quantocks. One of these oases, a little distance to the west of Middlezoy, is termed the Oaks, because those trees form a marked contrast to the prevailing elms and willows of the district. In the neighbouring ditches, that gradually cut into peat, and then into silt, prostrate oaks are very abundant[37].
Subsidence of the land at a remote geological period was the cause of the impassable state of these levels in the time of king Alfred, and the modern system of drainage which was carried out at a later date has been the cause of the improved condition which we see now, and which has made the Vale of Taunton Dean proverbial as the Garden of England.
2. In Alfred’s time the eye was greeted by a variety of trees which are not observable now. The elm predominates all over the plain. I asked the occupier of Athelney Farm about the trees on his land, and he said there was hardly anything but elm. Of other kinds he had only two ash-trees and one beech; ‘but (he added) we find bog-oak in the moors, and it makes good gate-posts.’ The elms have driven out both oak and ash, and whatever other sorts they touched in their ‘wrastling’ progress. These sombre grenadiers dress up their lines so close as to leave little room for other trees. They suck the fruitful soil more than any other tree, and they repay their costly nurture with timber of inferior value. Introduced by the Romans to serve as stakes and props in the culture of the vine, they have overrun the land like the imported rabbits in some of our colonies. In Alfred’s day these hungry aliens had not yet usurped the field, and there was still room for the display of the rich variety of nature—oak, ash, beech, fir, maple, yew, sycamore, hornbeam, holly, poplar, aspen, alder, hazel, wych-elm, apple, cherry, juniper, elder, willow, mountain ash, spindle-tree, buckthorn, hawthorn, wild plum, wild pear, service-tree, &c. But now, the fair places of the field are encumbered by the tall cousins of the nettle, and the most diversified of English counties is muffled with a monotonous shroud of outlandish and weedy growth.
In the animal world, likewise, the lapse of a thousand years has brought change. In the pastures the most frequent animal is the cow, and only on rare occasions, as we view the moors from some elevated ‘tump,’ have we the chance to see a little company of antlered deer careering over the open plain, clearing the rhines with an airy bound. In Alfred’s time too, cow-keeping was a stock industry, and we read of the king as entertained incognito by one of his own cowherds (apud quendam suum vaccarium).
But the proportion of wild to domesticated animals was far greater then than it is now. The whole stretch of country from Pedrida to the end of Exmoor, fifty miles long and twenty miles wide, was then almost a continuous forest, abounding with game of all kinds, but especially with red deer, which still continues, though in diminished numbers. This noble creature is thus described by Bewick:—
‘The Stag or Red Deer. This is the most beautiful animal of the deer kind. The elegance of his form, the lightness of his motions, the flexibility of his limbs, his bold, branching horns, which are annually renewed, his grandeur, strength, and swiftness, give him a decided pre-eminence over every other inhabitant of the forest[38].’
The red deer still lives and breeds along the southern coast of the Severn Sea, and this is I believe the only part of Great Britain in which this right royal animal still ranges at large in all the freedom of nature. I am informed by my friend Mr. Townshend that in Ireland they are kept as an ornament in some gentlemen’s parks, but that in a free state of nature they survive only in the mountains of Killarney.
Here it will be useful to read Leland’s notes of travel across the lowlands of Somerset, especially as they touch some places with which we are concerned. (I quote from the Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological and Natural History Society, No. xxxiii, ‘Leland in Somersetshire, 1540–1542.’)