APPENDIX. 723 



De Candolle, 1. c., p. 689, on the authority of Davies (Welsh 

 Botany,, p. 90), that dans le pays de Galles Ffa-wydden (wyddtn 4tant 

 une desinence commune aux arbres et Ffa le nom proprement dit) was 

 the name for this tree ; or with the special exemplification of this 

 with which the Welsh name for Hereford, a city with beech-trees 

 near it, ' Trefawydd? furnishes us (see Camden's Britannia, p. 476, 

 clt. Professor Pearson, I. <?.). As there is however no question that 

 the beech fails to form any very large proportion of our South 

 Britain peat-mosses, it may be suggested that this transference to 

 the beech by the Welsh of a name which originally belonged to the 

 oak (see Max Miiller, Science of Language, ser. ii. p. 236) must 

 have taken place in a country where a preponderance had been 

 gained by the former over the latter tree. If therefore Denmark 

 was the country, see supra, p. 631, whence the bronze-importing 

 invaders of this island came, the beech must have been a pro- 

 minent tree there at an earlier period than is usually supposed 1 . 

 Or it may have abounded here at that time and yet left, as in 

 Denmark, no remains in the uncongenial peat. 



1 As against the prominence, though not against the existence, of the beech in our 

 own country at a much later period might be urged the fact that it is not mentioned 

 by Chaucer in three places, ' The Assembly of Foules ' (ed. Bell, 1855, vol. iv. p. 195), 

 * The Romaunt of the Rose ' (vol. vii. p. 59), and * The Complaint of a Lover's Life ' 

 (vol. viii. p. 8), where he does mention nearly all the other trees which in the 

 fourteenth century entered largely into the composition of the English landscape; 

 to wit, the ( oke,' the ' asshe/ the ' elme,' the ' boxe/ the ' firre/ the ' ewe,' the * aspe,' 

 'notes/ s. 'philbert' (hazel), the 'bolas/ the 'pyn/ the 'maples/ the 'popler/ the 

 ' lyndes/ the ' hauthorne.' And it might be said that in a Welsh poem ascribed to 

 Taliessin, but referred by Professor Pearson (1. c. p. 48), to the fourteenth century, 

 the beech and lime are both left unmentioned in describing a battle of the trees ; 

 and that the beech is omitted from a much earlier Welsh poem ascribed to Llywarch 

 Hen in the sixth century. See Skene, ' Four Ancient Books of Wales,' i. pp. 279 and 

 576, cit. Pearson, I. c. As against the evidence furnished by a fourth passage from 

 Chaucer, ' The Knightes Tale/ vol. i. ed. cit. p. 182, in which, as in Spenser's ' Faery 

 Queen/ i. 7, 8, 9, the beech and also the birch and the willow are added to the tree 

 above enumerated, it might be objected that 'the whole description of the funeral 

 and games is taken from the sixth book of the Thebais ; ' and as a matter of fact we 

 have the words 'gli alti faggi' standing in the parallel passage, ' Teseide/ xi. 22, 

 col. 237, ed. Ven. 1838. But Professor Earle writes to me upon this matter to the fol- 

 lowing effect : ' In the Knightes Tale, the marshalling of the trees in a catalogue is in 

 manner Chaucer's own; and the majority of the trees, also, are his, and not Boccaccio's. 

 . . . But as far as philological and literary evidence goes, it is all in favour of the trees 

 being at Chaucer's time familiarly English. The word leech was ready to hand, and 

 in its final form which has no; since been modified. Yet that word was a considerable 

 remove from the Anglo-Saxon boc, and such modification postulates warm and con- 

 stant usage. The word is ancestral, older, I mean, than our distinct national 

 existence; it is so like in Anglo-Saxon to what it is in Icelandic and in German 

 as to prove that there was no breach of continuity in its use from the earliest 

 time.' 



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