l6o TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



devastation we may learn by such well-known incidents as the 

 laying waste of Yorkshire by the Conqueror, and of the 

 districts near the Border at a later period. 



The story of the first is told in detail by Freeman (7, iv. 

 288 ff.), while Vinogradoff (8, pp. 294 flF.) may be consulted for 

 results of harrying here and elsewhere. The effect of Border 

 warfare again leaves its mark on the tax assessments of 

 Edward I. and Edward III. In the Diocese of Carlisle (14a, 

 pp. 331 ff.), church after church " non taxatur quia totaliter 

 destructa." Similarly under Lancashire (14^, pp. 35 ff.), entry 

 after entry reads in some such terms as " Et jacent in eadem 

 parochia . . . terre steriles et inculte propter destructionem 

 ibi factam per Scottos." 



As we go back into the dimmer past we may be sure that 

 war, war from which no part of the land was long free, was 

 no less terrible and no less wasting (9, i. 26 ff.). It may be 

 that Romano-British agriculture was carried on at a higher 

 standard than it ever attained again until the later Middle 

 Ages. The evidence from classical authors is conflicting and 

 obscure. There appears to be no doubt that under the late 

 Republic a yield of wheat at the rate of ten times the seed 

 was common in Sicily and other parts of Italy. Subsequently 

 in Italy proper there seems to have been a sharp decline. 

 The evidence is collected by Dickson (10, ii. 92 ff.). We 

 cannot, however, safely apply any of it to the distant provinces. 

 For until long after the eleventh century the standard of 

 production in Britain was very low (n, pp. 378, 438; 12, i. 

 38 ff., 50 ff.): but no suggestion of a diminution of the 

 productiveness of corn crops, which might point to a larger 

 area of arable and a smaller area of woodland in the eleventh 

 century than the fifth, seems yet to have been advanced. 



If we turn to positive evidence on the state of the woodlands 

 in the early Middle Ages, we find that we have no reason to 

 weaken in the opinion that they were on the whole conserved, 

 and that the suggestion not infrequently made that timber 

 was little valued is untenable. Before the end of the seventh 

 century there were put together the laws of Ine, king of 

 Wessex : we must not imagine that they represent any legislative 

 change, but rather the reduction to writing (perhaps with some 

 added precision) of customs long observed by the West Saxons. 

 For our immediate purpose they are of value in that certain 



