SOME REMARKS ON BRITISH FOREST HISTORY. 1 75 



that it is but a commodity which, according to its use, becomes 

 a member now of one economic group, now of another. There 

 is hardly any commodity for which human ingenuity will not find 

 a substitute. Other materials will burn and give warmth, and 

 turf, peat, furze, dung, ^ coal, have been used by man from the 

 earliest times where timber has been hard to come by : and 

 peat, it is credibly reported, was preferred to wood by the Irish 

 in the seventeenth century, "the cutting and carriage of the 

 Turf being more easy than that of Wood."^ Other materials 

 besides wood will build houses and bridges, and indeed wood 

 was early found an unsatisfactory material. The most ancient 

 building regulations of London, FitzAylwin's Assize, greatly 

 favoured stone houses as a protection against the devastating 

 fires to which mediaeval cities were subject : ^ but building in 

 stone was expensive, and mediaeval London was ever far from 

 being a stone-built city. And though it was the ambition of 

 James L to have it said of him that he found London houses 

 •'of Stickes and left them of Bricke,"* this was a dream still 

 unrealised when the Great Fire consumed the old city. 



We have already seen that the timber import trade is of great 

 antiquity : but the timber brought from abroad was for 

 constructional purposes ; boards, planks, and wainscot of oak 

 and of softwoods were the chief imports, with round timber for 

 masts and spars. The great demand, however, was for fuel for 

 household and industrial purposes : the demand was great 

 enough to cause apprehension as to the sufficiency of the supply 

 of timber for shipbuilding and other constructional purposes ; 

 but it is necessary to remember that timber is expensive to 

 transport unless it can come by water, and that a shortage 



' As to the use in England of dung for fuel see Stand ish, Commons 

 Complaint {\(>ii), p. 2 ; New Directions of Experience (1613), p. 6 ; Fynes 

 Moryson, Itinerary [i6\y), iii. 147; Artificial Fire (a broadsheet, 1644); 

 Moore, Bread for the Poor (1653), p. 27 ; Evelyn, Sylva (1812 edn.), ii. 251. 



'^ Sir William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland (1672) in Economic 

 Writings (1899), p. 192. Dr G. O'Brien, Economic History of Ireland in the 

 Seventeenth Century, pp. 44, 148, attributes the use of peat to the destruction 

 of forests. Boate, Ireland's Natural History (1652), p. 106, says it is used 

 "in parts far distant from the sea, where they can have no Sea coales, and 

 where Woods are wanting, nor live well." Cf. Fynes Moryson, op. cit., iii. 

 161. 



* Liber de Antiquis Legibus, pp. 206 flf. 



* Tudor and Stuart Proclamations (R. Steele), No. 1 167; Cunningham, 

 Growth of English Industry and Commerce, ii. 316, n. i. 



