320 The Trees of Great Britain and Ireland 



lo inches in girth. For this tree Mr. Simmons told me, ;^ioo was offered to make 

 the keel of a ship forty or fifty years ago. It should live for many years, and may 

 perhaps become the finest timber oak in Windsor Forest. 



Mr. Menzies gives ^ an excellent explanation of the old custom of pollarding 

 oaks and beeches, which has produced the picturesque veterans which are so 

 common in most of our really old parks. For the support of the deer in 

 winter it was customary to lop off the boughs of the oak and beech. The law 

 required that no bough should be cut larger than a buck could turn over with 

 its horns, and after they had been stripped by the deer these branches became 

 the perquisite of the keepers, under the name of "fireboote," or "houseboote." 

 Any timber fit for the navy could not be cut without the sign manual of the 

 King, a rule yet extant ; but in times of civil war, and in royal forests which were 

 granted to favourites in the times of the Stuarts, the keepers often cut and sold 

 as timber or firewood a great deal more than the deer needed ; and notwith- 

 standing that these matters were investigated by James I. with his national and 

 personal thriftiness, and that the surveyors whom he employed were spoken of by the 

 country people as "shroade and terrible men,"^ these abuses increased to such a 

 point that the growing scarcity of naval timber was a common complaint for centuries. 



There is no doubt that browse or lop, being the natural winter food of deer 

 in hard weather, is more suitable for them than beans and maize, which is now 

 given in so many places probably to save trouble. I find in my own park that 

 ash and elm are the favourites, and beech the next best lop for deer, and only give 

 hay when the ground is frozen or covered with snow ; but many parks are so 

 overstocked with deer and with cattle in summer that in February and March 

 the former must have some extra food, or a heavy death-rate follows. 



Gloucestershire is not famous for fine oaks, though the Boddington Oak, near 

 Tewkesbury, now gone, must have been an exceptionally large tree. The Newland 

 Oak, near Coleford, is an immense pollard, with a short burry trunk no less than 

 43 feet in girth. An excellent photograph of it has been published as a postcard 

 by Mr. J. W. Porter of Coleford. There are some fine ones in the Winchcombe 

 Valley, near Sudeley Castle, one of which is 2^^ feet in girth ; but in the Vale of 

 Gloucester elms are commoner than oaks, and I know none of special note, though 

 Mr. J. R. Yorke tells me of a large tree still standing near Forthampton Court. 



The largest I have seen are in Witcombe Park, the seat of W. H. Hicks- 

 Beach, Esq., a small but picturesque park lying under the steep Birdlip Hill. 

 Here on fertile clay soil, facing north and west, are a number of very fine trees, 

 which, judging from the rings counted on one of the largest which has recently been 

 felled, are not so old as they appear to be. This tree, which measured about 

 90 feet by 17J feet, and contained 400 to 500 cubic feet, was only about 210 years 

 old, and beginning to fail in the upper branches, which were dying off. The largest 

 tree, in a very exposed position, has lost some of its biggest limbs, and measures 

 25 feet in girth at about 5 feet from the ground, and 50 feet round the roots at the 

 base. A very tall, well - shaped, handsome tree, with its bole clean and straight 



' op. at, 7. 2 Arthur Standish, TAe Common Good. 



