FORESTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. 309 
Evelyn’s “ Silva,” the first edition of which appeared in 1664, 
rendered an extremely important service to the cause of the 
woods, and there is no doubt that the ornamental plantations in 
which England far surpasses all other countries, are, in some 
measure, the fruit of Evelyn’s enthusiasm. In England, how- 
from a manuscript certainly not older than the 12th century, and in two citations 
from Anglo-Saxon charters, one published by Kemble in Codex Diplomuticus, 
the other by Thorpe in Diplomatarium Anglicum, in all which passages it more 
probably means peat than mineral coal. According to Way, Promptorium 
Parrulorum, p. 506, note, the Catholicon Anglicanum has ‘‘ A turfe grafte, 
turbarium.”  Grafte is here evidently the same word as the A.-S. grefa, 
and the Danish 70rvegraf, a turf-pit, confirms this opinion. Coal is not men- 
tioned in King Alfred’s Bede, in Neckam, in Glanville or in Robert of Glouces- 
ter, though the two latter writers speak of the allied mineral, jet, and are very 
full in their enumeration of the mineral productions of the island. 
In a Latin poem ascribed to Giraldus Cambrensis, who died after the year 
1220, but found also in the manuscripts of Walter Mapes (see Camden Society 
edition, pp. 131 and 350), and introduced into Higden’s Polychronicon (Lon- 
don, 1865, pp. 898, 399), carbo sub terra cortice, which can mean nothing but 
pit-coal, is enumerated among the natural commodities of England. Some of 
the translations of the 13th and 14th century render carbo by cool or col, some 
by gold, and some omit this line, as well as others unintelligible to the trans- 
lators. Hence, although Giraldus was acquainted with coal, it certainly was 
not generally known to English writers until at least a century after the time 
of that author. 
The earliest mediaeval notice of mineral coal I have met with is in a pas- 
sage cited by Ducange from a document of the year 1198, and it is an etymolo- 
gical observation of some interest, that carbones ferrei, as sea-coal is called in 
the document, are said by Ducange to have been known in France by the popu- 
lar name of julia, a word evidently identical with the modern French houwille 
and the Cornish Huel, which in the form wheal is an element in the name of 
many mining localities. 
England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Caesar says it wanted 
the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means the beech, 
which, as the remains in the Danish peat-mosses show, is a tree of late intro- 
duction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now native to 
that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been the same in 
England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the ‘‘ great store of firre” found 
lying ‘‘ at their whole lengths” in the ‘‘fens and marises”’ of Lancashire and 
other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure 
what species of evergreen Cesar intended by abies. The popular designations 
of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application 
