The Sto7y of our English Woodlands, 57 



Mansions and Demesnes with trees of venerable shade." He 

 appealed to their selfish aims when he begged them " by all 

 the rules and methods imaginable to convert their too ample 

 enclosures into lawns and ridings for exercise, health, and 

 prospect." He appealed to their commercial instincts when 

 he told them that he had " read of a certain frugal and most 

 industrious Italian nobleman, who, after his lady was brought 

 to bed of a daughter (considering that wood and timber was a 

 revenue coming on whilst the owners were asleep), commanded 

 his servants immediately to plant in his lands oaks, ashes, 

 and other profitable and marketable trees, to the number of 

 an hundred thousand ; how he then set to work and calculated 

 that each of those trees might be worth twenty pence before 

 his daughter became marriageable ; how that these items 

 would amount to 100,000 francs (or nearly ten thousand 

 pounds sterling) ; and lastly how he intended it to be given 

 with his daughter for a portion. This was good philosophy," 

 Evelyn adds, " and such as I am assured was frequently 

 practised in Flanders upon the very same account." 



Finally he appealed to their patriotic feelings by showing 

 that " there was not a cheaper, easier, or more excellent 

 expedient to advance ship timber, than that in all his Majesty's 

 and their own private forests, woods, and parks, the spreading 

 oak should be cherished, by plowing, and sowing barley, rye, etc. 

 (with due supply of culture and soil between them), as far as 

 may (without danger of the plowshare), be broken up." Like 

 the walnut trees in Burgundy, which, he said, stood in the best 

 ploughed lands, he would have had " the oaks (whose roots 

 derived relief far beyond the reach of their branches) 100 or 

 50 yards apart." He would have encouraged the needy 

 borderers to cultivate the outskirts of royal and seignorial 

 woodlands by letting them the land on long leases and easy 

 terms ; and he pointed out that if all of it were thus held 

 the hearts only of such great wooded tracts would be sufficient 

 for the sporting wants of their royal and noble owners. 



Daniel Defoe afterwards elaborated a scheme on these lines 

 for re-peopling the New Forest,^ and sent it to the Lord 

 ^ Tour through Britain, vol. i. p. 329, 7th edition. 



