OUR FOREST AND WOODLANDS
WHEN Britain was first brought by Roman ambition within the knowledge of Southern Europe, the interior of our Island was one vast forest. Cæsar and Strabo agree in describing its towns as being nothing more than spaces cleared of trees—"royds," or "thwaites" in North of England phrase—where a few huts were placed and defended by ditch or rampart. Somersetshire and the adjacent counties were covered by the Coit Mawr, or Great Wood. Asser tells us that Berkshire was so called from the Wood of Berroc, where the box-tree grew most abundantly. Buckinghamshire was so called from the great forests of beech (boc), of which the remnants still survive. The Cotswold Hills, and the Wolds of Yorkshire, are shown by their names to have been once far-spreading woodlands; and the same may be said of the Weald of Sussex, the subject, in part, of the preceding chapter. "In the district of the Weald," writes the Rev. Isaac Taylor, "almost every local name, for miles and miles, terminates in hurst, ley, den, or field. The hursts were the dense portions of the forests; the leys are the open forest-glades where the cattle love to lie; the dens are the deep wooded valleys, and the fields were little patches of 'felled' or cleared land in the midst of the surrounding forest. From Petersfield and Midhurst, by Billinghurst, Cuckfield, Wadhurst, and Lamberhurst, as far as Hawkshurst and Tenterden, these names stretch in an uninterrupted string." And, again, "A line of names ending in den testifies to the existence of the forest tract in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, and Huntingdon, which formed the western boundary of the East Saxon and East Anglican Kingdoms. Henley in Arden and Hampton in Arden are vestiges of the great Warwickshire forest of Arden, which stretched from the Forest of Dean to Sherwood Forest." * Hampshire was already a forest in the time of William the Conqueror: all he did was to sweep away the towns and villages which had sprung up within its precincts. Epping and Hainault are but fragments of the ancient forest of Essex, which extended as far as Colchester. Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, and the other northern counties, were the haunts of the wolf, the wild boar, and the red deer, which roamed at will over moorland and forest, and have given their names here and there to a bold upland or sequestered nook.
Even down to the time of Oueen Elizabeth immense tracts of primeval forest remained unreclaimed. Sir Henry Spelman ** gives the following list of those which were still in existence.
* Words and Places, pp. 381-3.
** Quoted in English Forests and Forest Trees.
