The Stoiy of our English Woodlands. 55 



had irresistibly led them, for the use of their compatriots. 

 Nor was Evelyn extravagant as times went, in his views on 

 the importance of the national timber supply. He had 

 numerous foreign precedents at his fingers' end, which 

 he cited in force of his arguments. In the Duchy of Luxem- 

 bourg, no farmer was free to fell a timber tree until he could 

 prove that he had planted another, and in the province of Biscay 

 the law strictly forced every landed proprietor who cut down 

 one tree, to plant three more immediately. In the vicinity 

 of Frankfort a young husbandman, before he was legally en- 

 titled to take a wife, had to produce a certificate in proof of his 

 having set a certain number of walnut trees. In some parts 

 of Germany any particularly fertile mast- bearer was under 

 special legal protection from the axe. In both France and 

 Germany the King's commissioners on Crown lands, the 

 Lords' woodwardens on other lands, divided every forest into 

 eighty partitions, so that by felling one each year, no tree was 

 under fourscore years in growth. Even then, an oak or other 

 glandiferous tree was reserved at the distance of every twenty 

 feet, and fenced round at each seeding time, so that its acorns, 

 becoming beaten into the soil by the autumn rains, might be 

 allowed to sprout forth. In a few years these seedlings were 

 fit either to be grubbed up and transplanted, or cut down and 

 used as fuel, or left standing as permanent timber. 



It is very probable that the foreign practice of pollarding 

 trees originated at a time when wood for iron smelting had to 

 be found somehow, and when the State forbade the fallage of 

 timber for such a purpose. 



Unlike Weston, Evelyn was no advocate of planting trees on 

 barren and exposed sites, bat wanted the very best land and 

 the best grown specimens for his purpose. " If I were to 

 make choice," he says, " of the place or the tree, it should be 

 such as grows in the best cowpasture or upland meadow, 

 where the mould is rich and sweet." ^ He did not agree with 

 those authorities who chose a situation in which the young 

 plantations would have to brave the full fury of the north-east 

 wind, preferring an aspect which exposed only the narrow 

 * The grammar is Evelyn's own. 



