EXTENT OF ANCIENT FORESTS. 67 



or thereabouts, of which 3,520, or not quite a tenth part, 

 was in a state of cultivation ; while the vast residuum 

 stretched far and wide, like an ocean of waste inter- 

 spersed with a few inhabited islands." * Let us try to 

 realise the state of things, when out of 63,657 acres of 

 land, over 60,000 were either forest or waste, and nearly 

 half of that amount unclaimed and unappropriated; 

 while close at hand towards the north was the still 

 larger and wilder forest of Bowland, and towards the 

 south that of Eosendale with an amazing range of moors 

 beyond it. 



But this statement only shows how the great central 

 range was covered and fringed with wastes and forests 

 on its western side. On the eastern side in the same 

 neighbourhood, the country of Craven, it was just the 

 same, even so lately as the time of Henry VIII. Leland 

 says : — " The forest from a mile beneth Grnaresburgh 

 (Knaresborough) to very nigh Bolton yn Craven is about 

 a twenty miles in lenght : and in bredeth it is in sum 

 places an viij. miles,"f which is just about what it is, the 

 whole intermediate district between Bolton and Bowland 

 forest or between it and Whalley, being about as wild as 

 anything can be. 



I will not fatigue the reader by carrying him to the 

 remaining parts of the north of England, where the 

 same state of things prevailed, often on an even yet 

 larger scale ; one forest alone in Cumberland, and that 

 not in its wildest part, being described in " The 

 Chartulary of Lanercost Priory " as extending at the 

 time of the Norman Conquest from Carlisle to Penrith, 



* Dr. WMtaker's " Parish of Whalley and Honor of Clitheroe," 3rd 

 edition, 1818, p. 171. 



t Leland' s " Itinerary." 



p 2 



