EARLY FORESTS 7 



keepers of each of these forests. On 3Oth January, 1223, the 

 king instructed the sheriffs of all the counties containing 

 forests to place the money accruing from the sale of the wind- 

 fall in some religious house within their jurisdiction, there to 

 await further orders, and to place with it a roll giving full 

 particulars of the sales, drawn up by a specially appointed 

 clerk named in the letters patent. 



The heading to these instructions on the Patent and Close 

 Rolls of Henry III. is De Cableicio. The term cableicium, or 

 cablicium signifies windfallen trees, and corresponds to the 

 old French word chablis, which had a like meaning. It is 

 quite clear that the term "cablish" (to use the English form), 

 strictly speaking, implies uprooted trees, as distinct from 

 mere branches. The forest officials, after the great gale, 

 were ordered to remove nothing, nee de cableicio illo neque 

 de branchura per impulsionem venti prostrata. Nevertheless, 

 the word was occasionally given a wider meaning as, for 

 instance, in 1223, when cableicium was applied to twelve 

 great branches that had fallen in Windsor forest. But in 

 this case the wood was sufficiently substantial to be reserved 

 for the repair of the king's houses. Cablish seems never 

 to have been applied to such windstrewn wood as would be 

 used for fuel. We have met with the word in several forest 

 rolls or records in Northamptonshire, Rutland, Hampshire, 

 and Derbyshire as late as the time of Henry VII. ; though at 

 that period the English word rote/alien, or rootefaler, was more 

 usual as descriptive of the tree uprooted by the wind, and was 

 used in distinction to the mere wyndfallen wood of smaller 

 dimensions. 



Other forests that occur in the Patent and Close Rolls of the 

 earlier years of Henry III., which are not specifically named 

 in the great storm order of 1222, are: Alnwick, Northumber- 

 land; Easingwold and Wakefield, Yorks; Clipston and Silver- 

 ston, Northants ; Acornbury and Kilpeck, Hereford ; Peak 

 Forest and Horston, Derbyshire ; Alveston, Furches, Keyne- 

 sham, and Horewood, Gloucester ; Feckenham, Worcester ; 

 Cheddar and Selwood, Somerset ; Freemantle, Hants ; Buck- 

 holt, Clarendon, Ifwood, Sugrave, and Weybridge, Wilts ; 

 Poorstock, Dorset ; Finmere and Woodstock, Oxon ; and 

 Havering, Essex. 



