XXVII. 



WINDSOR FOREST AND ITS FAMOUS TREES. 



By the IIkv. Canon Gee, D.D. 



Head at Watford, \&th January, 1883. 



(Abridged.) 



Of course I understand that, in reading a paper before a Natural 

 History Society, no information is strictly in place but such as 

 will promote the study of Nature, whether followed out in the 

 winter with our books at home, or pursued during the summer 

 in the pleasant rambles of our Field Club. I have, however, for 

 myself to-night (as on a former occasion) to ask permission to eke 

 out my own slender acquaintance with natural history by working 

 in such particulars of general history as may seem not unconnected 

 with my subject.* 



I will commence with Windsor Forest, as a forest, and attempt 

 to lay out before you the extensive area which I have rashly 

 proposed to consider. The difficulty, if you go back to early 

 times, though not yet to the planting of its trees, is to know how 

 to set bounds to that which was for ages boundless ; at least in 

 the sense of being unenclosed and without any visible boundaries. 

 It is temptingly easy to suppose that in pre-historic times the 

 whole tract of country south-west of the city of London was 

 one large woodland or forest. I find it so laid down in some of 

 the maps which profess to show us Roman, Saxon, and Norman 

 Britain, as these races successively dealt with the land. Out of 

 this wide tract were in time defined and recognised two woodland 

 districts known to us as " Windsor Forest," in Berks, and the 

 " New Forest," in Hants. 



We are sure that William the Conqueror did not begin our 

 forest. In the reign of Edward the First (say 200 years after the 

 Conquest) an order was issued to the constable that he, with the 

 assistance of the foresters and verderers, should sell the " old dead 

 oaks" in the forest, and they hardly could have called for removal 

 had they not seen the Saxon and Dane in the land ; had they 

 not, like Coplestine, Crewys, and Coplestane, all been " at hame 

 when the Conqueror came." We take then Windsor Forest to 

 have been the gradual appropriation and arrangement of all that 

 woodland district, which stretches into Berkshire south and south- 

 westwards of the Castle standing on the extreme east of the 

 county. The Eiver Thames is the boundary of the Castle domain 

 on the east or north-east, and this river separates Bucks from 

 Berks. 



The present aspect of the forest dates from its surrender to the 

 nation in that compact made about 1813, when commissioners, 

 afterwards succeeded by the present Commissioners of Woods and 



* The greater portion of the historical matter is omitted. — Ed. 



VOL. II. — PART VI. 13 



