REVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS. 239 
courts, forest officers, beasts of the forest, forest agistments 
or grazing and pannage, hounds and hunting, trees of the 
forest, and later forest history—the early and the later general 
history (chapters i. and viii.) being given in 18 pages. 
For the general reader this is the most interesting part of the 
book, which occupies rather less than one-quarter of the volume, 
while the remaining three-quarters deal in detail either with 
individual forests, or with the royal forests county by county. 
In any work of this class there are usually errors, omissions, 
and inconsistencies, that can only be rectified when a second 
edition may be called for. Thus, on page 1 it is said that 
“Dr Wedgwood seems to be right in considering ‘forest’ as a 
modified form of the Welsh gores, gorest, waste, waste ground ; 
whence the English word gorse, furze, the growth of waste 
land”: while on page 5 we are told, and this contradictory 
statement is correct, that “The term ‘forest,’ that had long 
been in like use on parts of the Continent, was then [after the 
Norman Conquest] introduced into England.” Again, speaking 
of the fictitious forest laws of Canute (purporting to have been 
issued in 1018, though this is not stated), it is said that they 
were “termed Constitutiones de Foresta,’ and that they were a 
“ Latin Code, in thirty-four brief chapters.” Surely this Norman 
forgery was written in the Danish tongue, and only subsequently 
translated into Latin? The first genuine code of forest laws, 
as distinct from regulations applying to the royal hunting- 
grounds of the Saxon and Danish kings (tracts subsequently 
converted by William the Conqueror into /orests), was the 
Assize of Woodstock, 1184. In the Index the references to 
*« Assize of Woodstock” are pp. 11, 68, on neither of which the 
date (1184) is given, though it is casually recorded on page 
48 in connection with greyhounds. 
For the modern forester the chief interest centres in Chapter VII. 
—‘ The Trees of the Forest” ; but, unfortunately, it only extends 
to seven pages. The most interesting point noted is that, as 
early as 1313, a difference seems to have been made between 
guercus and robur. ‘The precise meaning of vobur, and in 
what it differed from guercus, is by no means easy to ascertain. 
The two terms appear side by side in almost every old forest 
account throughout England. . . . Probably it [vodur] may 
usually mean an oak which has been pollarded; but is it not 
possible that guercus and robur, at all events in some forest 
