8 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 



cultivatiqn ; while the vast residuum stretched far 

 and wide, like an ocean of waste interspersed with 

 a few inhabited islands."* Let us try to realize the 

 state of things, when out of 63,657 acres of land, 

 over 60,000 were either forests 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, so admirably 

 described by Whitaker, and towards the south that 

 of Rosendale 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 Gnaresborough to very nigh Bolton 

 yn Craven is about twenty miles in length ; and in 

 bredeth it is in sum places an viii miles ;" the whole 

 intermediate district between Bolton and Bowland 

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

 as anything can be. In the north of England the 

 same state of things prevailed, often on an even 

 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, a distance of eighteen miles, and as "a 

 goodly forest, full of woods, red-deer and fallow, wild 

 swine, and all manner of wild beasts. " 



* Whitaker, "History of Whalley," p. 171. 



