284 



Selwood Forest. 



Woodhouse, just on the skirts of Longleat — a house which became 

 afterwards the scene of a lively military transaction in the Civil Wars 

 — of which you have a full account in Mr. Darnell's book. 



Before concluding I would just say a word about the timber of 

 Selwood. Generally speaking we expect to find in historical forests 

 very old trees — old fellows that have stood the storms of centuries 

 without flinching, and have gone on growing as if nothing was the 

 matter. Some people, in trying to explain the name itself, have 

 imagined that the first syllable is the Anglo-Saxon seala, a willow, 

 as if it had been remarkable for that kind of tree more than any 

 other. It may have been so in the great flat marshy lands of 

 Somerset, which were anciently forest, but about Selwood, as we 

 know it, the willow, I should say, was rather remarkable for its 

 absence—just as in Wilts I know a farm in the stone wall country, 

 upon which there is really hardly a bush ; still it glories in the 

 name of Thickthorn Farm. Other people, finding that the old 

 Welsh name for Selwood was Coit-maur — which means great wood 

 — will have it that Sel means great, though in the meanwhile they 

 can produce no language in the world where such a word existed 

 with such a meaning. Now as to the timber. Almost all the 

 venerable, really patriarchal, trees have disappeared. The oak at 

 Woodhouse, on which the unlucky Warminster men were hanged, 

 was cut down. John Aubrey, our Wiltshire antiquary, saw the 

 tree and described it. He says " Three score and ten carts could 

 stand under it, and from the body of it to the extreme branch 

 Captain Hampden made nineteen paces, and his paces were not 

 less than a yard/' There used to be a famous oak, called the Hey 

 Oak, which stood near a lodge of Lord Heytesbury's, in Sowley 

 Wood. An old man told me he remembered it. It was at this 

 tree that the sheriff of the county used to hold his court in the open 

 air, at what was called the Sheriff's Farm, for maintaining certain 

 rights, and receiving certain old payments due to the Crown. An 

 old and remarkable tree, used for this purpose, often gave the name 

 to the hundred in which it stood, as in Yorkshire there is the hundred 

 of Barkstone Ash, and in Wilts we have the hundred of Elstub, 

 which is really Ellen-stub, an old elder tree. There was, again, at 



