THE NEW FOREST. 67 



credible the legend is that the great wood of Hampage 

 was felled by the Bishop of Winchester in the three days 

 which were the limit of his leave, — the only tree that was 

 spared being the Gospel Oak, a still surviving witness of 

 the time and of the fact. 



" It is essential to a just conception of the ancient 

 forests of our land, that we should ascertain what were 

 the trees which composed them. What were the in- 

 digenous trees of Britain ? It is upon the character of 

 these that our mental picture must depend. Were the 

 forests an impenetrable bush ? Or a collection of bare 

 poles with all their foliage at the top, such as may be seen 

 in some of the Colonies or in the United States of 

 America 1 Or should we have a truer notion of them 

 from that large tract so strangely called the .New Forest 

 still, though it. is old enough to have a Latin name 

 besides ? 



" The known native forest trees of England are singu- 

 larly few. The oak, the birch, the wych elm, the willow, 

 the alder, the ash, the maple, the aspen and the yew, 

 almost complete the list of timber trees found here by the 

 Romans. The Welsh name of the beech (fawydd) may 

 easily be traced to the Latin fagm; Csesar's statement 

 (needlessly discredited) that this tree was not found in 

 Britain is not likely to have rested on the very scanty 

 opportunity he himself had of personal inspection. His 

 words ' prgeter fagum et abietem ' do not except the Scotch 

 pine, but the silver fir. The lime and the beech were 

 well and widely established here before the Norman 

 period, but may both be set down to Roman introduction. 

 The great Tortworth chestnut, so called in Stephen's reign, 

 may be the oldest of deciduous trees in our land ; but this 

 it may be without being indigenous. We have more than 

 one Lyndhurst, so named from the lime, but yet the lime 

 did not exist in the ancient forests. Everything conspires 

 to assign precedence to the oak — the earliest records, the 

 testimony of nomenclature, scientific researches, the nature 

 of the wood. In the vast bogs of Denmark, from which 



