10 INTRODUCTION. 



at the present day. Camden^ describing the county, says, ' It 

 is a fertile country; the lower parts are cultivated into 

 pleasant fields and meadows and the hills are covered with 

 great store of woods. ^ [Bnfannia.) But during the time of 

 the Civil Wars most of the woods were destroyed except on 

 the Chiltern Hills. Plot, commenting in 1677 on the above 

 passage of Camden's, writes, ' The Hills, 'tis true, before the 

 late unhappy Wars, were well enough (as he says) beset with 

 woods, where 'tis now so scarcy, that 'tis a common thing to 

 sell it by weight, and not only at Oxford but at many places 

 in the Northern parts of the shire. And thus it is every- 

 where but in the Chiltern country, which remains to this day 

 a woody tract.' [Kat. Hist. Oxon, p. 51.) 



It is probable that over a large part of the county the woods 

 thus destroyed were never renewed, although ornamental 

 timber was planted to a considerable extent and hedgerow 

 trees were encouraged. Wichwood, or Wychwood, was the 

 most extensive stretch of woodland, and was an ancient Royal 

 Forest. ' Hard by,' writes Camden in the latter part of the 

 sixteenth century, ' Wichwood Forest is of large extent, and 

 yet the bounds of it were once much wider : For King Richard 

 the third disforested a great part of Wichwood between 

 Woodstock and Brightstow, which King Edward the fourth 

 had taken into the limits of that Forest, as we are informed 

 by John Rous of Warwick.' (Gibson's edition, p. 294.) That 

 it once extended as far south as Bampton is shown by the 

 old name for that place — Bampton-in-the-Bush. When the 

 'Wichwood Disafforesting Act 1853' (16 a?id 17 Vict. cap. 

 36) was passed, the area of the Forest was stated in the 

 preamble to the Act as 3735 acres. 



At the present day the chief woods are those which stretch 

 in a great belt across Mid Oxon, comprising portions of the 

 much diminished Wichwood, consisting chiefly of scattered 

 woods extending to Ditchley on the north and Southleigh on 

 the south, and reaching eastward to the plantations of Blenheim 

 at Woodstock and thence south-east to Wood Eaton, Beckley, 

 Forest Hill, and Waterperry. In the Chiltern district the hills 

 along the whole range from Mapledurham to Crowel are capped 



