150 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



pursued will be found in the "Joint Annual Report of the 

 Forestry Branches" for 1912-13, * and fuller details will be found 

 in the Reports of the Commissioners appointed under the Act 

 of 1786 (26 Geo. III. c. 87). The history of the Forest of Dean 

 may be taken as example. The Crown was empowered in 

 1668 to enclose and plant up 11,000 acres: this was apparently 

 done, but by 1705 the fences had apparently been allowed to 

 lapse. In 1736 the local officer in charge reported that the 

 forest had been entirely neglected during the preceding thirty 

 years, and that only a few of the 11,000 acres remained 

 enclosed. In 1788 the Commissioners appointed under the 

 Act of two years previously reported that since the beginning 

 of the century all care appeared to have ceased ; the actual 

 area remaining enclosed was only 675 acres. About the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century Lord Nelson remarked, 

 " The state of the forest at this moment is deplorable . . . the 

 generality of trees for these last fifty years have been allowed 

 to stand too long ; they are passed by instead of removed, and 

 thus occupy a space which ought to have been replanted with 

 young trees . . . where good timber is felled nothing is planted, 

 and nothing can grow self-sown, for the deer (of which only a 

 few remain) bark all the young trees. Vast droves of hogs are 

 allowed to go into the woods in the autumn, and if any fortunate 

 acorn escapes their search, and takes root, then flocks of sheep 

 are allowed to go into the forest, and they bite off the tender 

 shoot. . . . There is also another cause of the failure of timber : 

 a set of people called Forest Free Miners, who consider them- 

 selves as having a right to dig for coal in any part they please ; 

 these people, in many places, enclose pieces of ground, which 

 are daily increasing by the inattention, to call it by no worse 

 name, of the surveyors, verderers, etc., who have charge of the 

 forest." 



The minutiae of English forest laws are not a matter of great 

 importance to those who are dealing with the forest policy of 

 to-day, but it is to be regretted that Mr Stebbing should not be 

 accurate. He states that " by . . . the ' Assize of Woodstock ' 

 the old forest laws were modified and made independent of the 

 common law of the country." This is apparently borrowed from 



1 Cd. 7488, chapters iii. and iv. See also English Forests and Forest Trees, 

 1853 : a popular account, but reprinting some valuable documents, in 

 particular a report by Lord Nelson on the Forest of Dean, which is a scathing 

 condemnation of official incompetence. 



