I go TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



REVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



The Historical Geography of the Wealden Iron Industry. 

 By M. C. Delany. Benn Brothers. Pp. 62, 3 maps. 

 Price 4s. 6d. net. 



The series of historico-geographical monographs, edited by 

 Professor H. J. Fleure, which is to be published under the 

 auspices of the Geographical Association, opens with a volume 

 which might with equal propriety be entitled a historical survey 

 of the Forest of the Weald. For the life of the iron industry in 

 Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, depended upon the supply of charcoal 

 from the great stretch of woodlands of south-eastern England, 

 and its death was due as much to the destruction of the wood- 

 lands as to the invention of smelting with coke. Before the 

 rival process had made headway, the iron industry in the Weald 

 was already declining, and it may with truth be said that it was 

 the discovery of the coke process, by Abraham Darby, which 

 saved the situation in Britain : extensive timber supplies and 

 large industrial populations consort ill together. 



Miss Delany's monograph traces the growth of the industry, 

 and shows how its distribution was governed by supplies of ore, 

 wood, and water, and the development of means of communica- 

 tion. It suffers from the fact that she has principally used 

 secondary authorities, and these not always of the best; she 

 seems also to have found the material she has collected on the 

 details of the iron industry a little unmanageable. In con- 

 sequence, perhaps, we are not told a great deal of the interactions 

 of agriculture and industry — although space can be found to tell 

 us twice (pp. 30, 41) that St Paul's railings were made at 

 Lamberhurst. The result is, unfortunately, that the full story 

 of the forest is far from being told. 



Such defects, and a number of mistakes in detail, suggest 

 that it would be as well to enlist the services of a professional 

 historian in editing future volumes in the series, and to encourage 

 the authors to consult more largely original sources. A glance 

 at Domesday would have told Miss Delany that the custom in 

 Sussex was to give one pig in seven, not ten, as payment for 

 pannage; but she might have learned the same fact from 

 Vinogradoff's English Society in the Eleventh Century, or 



