284, Selwood Forest. 
Woodhouse, just on the skirts of Longleat—a house which became 
afterwards the scene of a lively military transaction in the Civil Wars 
—of which you have a full account in Mr. Daniell’s book. 
Before concluding I would just say a word about the timber of 
Selwood. Generally speaking we expect to find in historical forests 
very old trees—old fellows that have stood the storms of centuries 
without flinching, and have gone on growing as if nothing was the 
matter. Some people, in trying to explain the name itself, have 
imagined that the first syllable is the Anglo-Saxon sea/a, a willow, 
as if it had been remarkable for that kind of tree more than any 
other. It may have been so in the great flat marshy lands of 
Somerset, which were anciently forest, but about Selwood, as we 
know it, the willow, I should say, was rather remarkable for its 
absence—just as in Wilts I know a farm in the stone wall country, 
upon which there is really hardly a bush; still it glories in the 
name of Thickthorn Farm. Other people, finding that the old 
Welsh name for Selwood was Coit-maur—which means great wood 
—will have it that Sel means great, though in the meanwhile they 
can produce no language in the world where such a word existed 
with such a meaning. Now as to the timber. Almost all the 
venerable, really patriarchal, trees have disappeared. The oak at 
Woodhouse, on which the unlucky Warminster men were hanged, 
was cut down. John Aubrey, our Wiltshire antiquary, saw the 
tree and described it. He says “Three score and ten carts could 
stand under it, and from the body of it to the extreme branch 
Captain Hampden made nineteen paces,and his paces were not 
less than a yard.” There used to be a famous oak, called the Iley 
Oak, which stood near a lodge of Lord Heytesbury’s, in Sowley 
Wood. An old man told me he remembered it. It was at this 
tree that the sheriff of the county used to hold his court in the open 
air, at what was called the Sheriff’s Farm, for maintaining certain 
rights, and receiving certain old payments due to the Crown. An 
old and remarkable tree, used for this purpose, often gave the name 
to the hundred in which it stood, as in Yorkshire there is the hundred 
of Barkstone Ash, and in Wilts we have the hundred of Elstub, 
which is really Ellen-stub, an old elder tree. There was, again, at 
