8 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 
cultivation; while the vast residuum stretched far 
and wide, like an ocean of waste interspersed with 
a few inhabited islands.”* Let us try to realize the 
state of things, when out of 63,657 acres of land, 
over 60,000 were either forests or waste, and nearly 
half of that amount unclaimed and unappropriated, 
while close at hand towards the north was the still 
larger and wilder forest of Bowland, so admirably 
described by Whitaker, and towards the south that 
of Rosendale with an amazing range of moors beyond 
it. But this statement only shows how the great 
central range was covered and fringed with wastes 
and forests on its western side. On the eastern side 
in the same neighbourhood, the country of Craven, 
it was just the same even so lately as the time of 
Henry VIII. Leland says:—‘ The forest, from a 
mile beneth Gnaresborough to very nigh Bolton 
yn Craven is about twenty miles in length; and in 
bredeth it is in sum places an viii miles ;” the whole 
intermediate district between Bolton and Bowland 
forest, or between it and Whalley, being about as wild 
as anything can be. In the north of England the 
same state of things prevailed, often on an even 
larger scale; one forest alone in Cumberland, and 
that not in its wildest part, being described in “The 
Chartulary of Lanercost Priory” as extending at 
the time of the Norman Conquest from Carlisle to 
Penrith, a distance of eighteen miles, and as “a 
goodly forest, full of woods, red-deer and fallow, wild 
swine, and all manner of wild beasts.” 
* Whitaker, ‘‘ History of Whalley,” p. 171. 
