78 OUR FORESTS AND WOODLANDS 
esteem’d a consideration of too sordid and vulgar 
a nature for Nodle Persons and Gentlemen to busie 
themselves withal, and who oftner find ways to 
fell down and destroy their Trees and Plantations, 
then either to repair or improve them.’ 
As a good Royalist he gives a hard knock to 
the heroes of the Commonwealth, and at the 
same time indicates certain of the causes of the 
excessive clearance of woodlands, when he con- 
tinues: ‘But what shall I then say of our late 
prodigious Spoilers, whose furious devastation of 
so many goodly Woods and Forests have left an 
infamy on their Names and Memories not quickly 
to be forgotten! I mean our unhappy Usurpers, 
and injurious Seguestrators; not here to mention 
the deplorable necessities of a Gallant and Loyal 
Gentry, who for their Compositions were (many of 
them) compell’d to add yet to this Waste, by an 
inhumane and unparallel’d Zyranny over them, to 
preserve the poor remainder of their Fortunes, and 
to find them Bread,’ 
The particular difficulty about oak timber for 
shipbuilding, however, became greater as time 
went on and the requirements of the nation in- 
creased. The tonnage of the navy, which had 
