816 
THE PRINCPLES OF BOTANY. 
marks, or to stand as witnesses of particular events; thus, 
we have Gospel oaks, and my friend Edwin Lees speaks of 
an oak at Malvern in the following words: 
“ As forming a. good picture of sylvan scenery, ‘ The 
Grove’ at Little Malvern may he referred to, on the eastern 
edge of which is a fine spreading oak, known as f The 
Benedictine Oak,’ which, had it the faculty of Tennyson’s 
e talking oak,’ would doubtless bear witness to the colloquies 
of monks from the adjacent priory. Though this particu¬ 
lar oak can only make pretension to have had Benedictine 
monks under its branches when Little Malvern Priory was 
intact, yet in those days there were older patrician trees' 
existing going much further back into f the times before 
them,’ and of the priory itself it might then have been 
justly said, in the words of Byron— 
“ It stood embosom’d in a lonely valley, 
Crown’d by high woodland, where the Druid oak 
Stood like Caractacus in act to rally 
His host with broad arms ’gainst the thunder-stroke, 
And from beneath his boughs were seen to sally 
The dappled foresters.” 
Trans. Malvern Meld Club , p. 83. 
A fine tree of the Q. robur intermedia , probably as old as 
five centuries, occurs at Clifton Mabank, Dorset; it measures 
twenty-eight feet in circumference at a yard from the ground, 
and has all the giant aspect of the commoner form. 
As regards the Q. robur sessiliflora , we know of no trees 
of the age of the commoner forms. Both in Alice Holt and 
Wyre forests this form abounds; and though they are hand¬ 
some trees, yet their size and general smoothness of outline 
show them not to be so old as the more veteran Q. robur 
pedunculata. At the same time there is reason to think 
that all the forms mentioned were always common to our 
island; but the greater straightness and length of bole of 
the Q. robur sessiliflora point it out as the best adapted for 
the timber work of the middle ages, and hence we find it 
adopted in some of our earlier ecclesiastic and monkish 
buildings, used for roofs for large halls—notably Westmin¬ 
ster Hall—barns, and the like, of which some of the tithe 
barns belonging to the old abbeys are often found examples 
of timbered roofs, one of which, at Bredon, in Worcestershire, 
was capable of admitting six-and-thirty waggon loads of corn 
to be sheltered side by side, a no bad building in <e catching 
weather” in which to secure the ecclesiastic provisions. 
The uses of the oak and other plants of the order are very 
clearly summarised by Dr. Lindley : 
