OCTANDRIA. TETRAGYNIA. Riiodiola. 507 
727 '— II. Ox. xii. 10. 8— Pet. 42. 2 — Kniph. 2 — Ger. 426— Cam. Epit. 
769—Fuchs. 665—Trag. 913—J. B. iii. 683 —Lome. i. 62. 1. 
from the ground, and its trunk rose full sixty feet quite straight and clear of branches. 
Bath Soc. i. Mr. Marsham. Some few other examples, which as still extant, may reward 
the research of the modern tourist, we shall here particularize. The Swilcar Oak (Strutt) 
in Needwood Forest, six hundred years old, is not yet in the last stage of decay. Beggars’ 
Oak (do.) Blithfield park, Staffordshire, contains eight hundred and twenty seven cubic feet 
of timber, and in 1812 was valued at 200/. Fredville Oak, Kent (do.) is supposed to 
contain fourteen hundred feet of timber. Panshanger Oak (do.) contains one thousand 
feet of timber, and measures nineteen feet girth a yard from the ground, though scarcely 
yet in its prime. Salcey Forest Oak, Northamptonshire (do.), at one yard from the 
ground, measures in girth twenty four feet. Abbot’s Oak, Woburn (do.), upon whose 
branches were executed, in 1537, Roger Hobbs, Abbot of Woburn, together with the 
Vicar of Puddington, by order of Henry VIII. for refusing to surrender their sacer- 
dotal rights: on which J. W. Wiffen thus apostrophizes the venerable tree, truly a 
“ vetustum monumentum,” worthy of perpetual preservation to warn posterity of the danger 
of submitting to arbitrary power, even in a lawful monarch. 
“Yes, old memorial of the mitred monk, 
Thou livest to flourish in a brighter day. 
And seem’st to smile, that pure and patriot vows 
Are breath’d where Superstition reign’d.” 
Shelton Oak, near Shrewsbury (do.), called the “ grette Oake” in 1543, and by tradition 
believed to have served the “ irregular and wild Glendower ” for a post of observation pre¬ 
vious to the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, now measures at one foot from the ground thirty- 
seven feet girth. Queen’s Oak, Huntingfield, Suffolk (do.), from which the Virgin Queen 
is believed to have shot a buck with her own hand, whilst enjoying the chase with Lord 
Hunsdon, now measures at five feet from the ground, thirty four feet in girth. Though 
not the most gigantic, among the most interesting of its kind, and as such likely to be 
preserved for ages yet to come, is Sir Philip Sidney’s Oak, at Penshurst, as Waller de¬ 
scribes it, 
-“ yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark 
Of noble Sidney’s birth.” 
An Oak called the King, growing in Wvnnstay Park, North Wales, measures thirty 
feet in circumference, several feet from the ground. Gog and Magog, in Yardley forest; 
the former measures twenty eight feet at three feet from the ground, and contains sixteen 
hundred and fifty eight feet of timber : the latter is of still more imposing dimensions, 
though not equal in solid bulk. The Shellard’s Lane Oak, Gloucestershire, (PI. 1 of said 
Journal), is less remarkable for its magnitude than for decided characters of antiquity, and 
for the vigour with which its hamadryad, though alone in the land, still inspires it. Till 
1789 stood a most venerable Oak in the Water-walk of Magdalen College, Oxford, which 
is supposed to have existed at the period of the Norman conquest, it having been a notable 
tree when the college was founded in 1448. “But the most magnificent Oak ever 
known to have grown in England,” observes the author of the Journal of a Naturalist, 
“was probably that dug out of Hatfield bog. It was one hundred and twenty feet in 
length, twelve in diameter at the base, ten in the middle, and six at the smaller end; so 
that the but for sixty feet squared seven feet of timber. This extraordinary vegetable 
exceeded in magnitude even the famous larch brought to Rome in the reign of Tiberius, as 
recorded in Plin. Nat. Hist.” Among the Sylva Caledonia, (anciently at least as full of 
timber as South Britain), may be named the Wallace Oak, which stands on the spot 
which gave birth to the “ patriot hero,” of Elderslie, near Paisley. Of most of these stately 
foresters it may be justly said: 
- “ immota manet, multosque nepotes, 
Multa virftm, volvens durando saecula vincit.” Virg. 
And toss their giant arms amid the skies, 
While each assailing blast increase of strength supplies. 
Indeed Pliny alluding to the vast age to which such trees attain, describes them in the 
Hercynian forest as coeval with the world, “ Hercyniae sylvae roborum vestitas intacta 
aevis et congenita mur.do prope imuiortali sorte rniracula excedit.” 1. xvi. c. 2. 
