The Presidential Address. 
29 
arrival of the Roman emperor Claudius at that city, when 
the large tribe of the Trinobantes cultivated the cleared land 
between the then still broad and unembanked estuaries of the 
Stour, the Lea, and the Thames. 53 Whatever they may have 
been before, under the Roman military occupancy, the Britons 
became dwellers in towns. The Roman legionaries, with the 
assistance, no doubt, of native labour, drained fens, made 
paved causeways over morasses, 56 embanked rivers, and cut 
high roads through primaeval forests; but in all probability 
in the latter operation they made as many morasses in 
the woodlands as they drained in the open country, the 
33 I am incline&'to doubt if the Trinobantes held any territory west of 
so natural a boundary as the Lea. Their border settlement may have 
been Durolitum (Leyton ?). 
36 “It was a land of uncleared forests, with a climate as yet not miti¬ 
gated by the organised labours of mankind. The province in course of 
time became a flourishing portion of the Empire; the court orators 
dilated on the wealth of ‘Britannia Felix’ and the heavy corn-fleets 
arriving from the granaries of the North : and they wondered at the 
pastures almost too deep and rich for the cattle, and hills covered with 
innumerable flocks of sheep ‘ with udders full of milk and backs weighed 
down with wool.’ The picture was too brightly coloured, though drawn 
in the Golden Age. It is difficult to measure the slow advance of 
agriculture. We know that at one time the wolves swarmed in Sherwood 
and Arden, the wild boar roamed in Grovely, and the white-maned Unis 
was hunted in the northern forests. The work of reclaiming the wilder¬ 
ness began in the days of Agricola. The Eomans felled the woods along 
the lines of then military roads ; they embanked the rivers and threw 
causeways across the morasses, and the natives complained that their 
bodies and hands were worn out in draining the fens and extending the 
clearings in the forests. In the course of centuries the woodlands 
shrank to a mere fraction of their former extent. The ground was 
required for corn and pasture, the trees were consumed for fuel, or used 
in building or making the charcoal required in the mineral furnaces ; and 
the hill-sides were kept bare as sheep-farming increased by the neglect to 
fence and protect the coppices. The area of cultivation was continually 
increasing ; yet even under the later Plantagenets there were no less than 
sixty-eight royal forests, besides thirty which had been converted into 
private chases ; in each was included ‘ a territory with great woods for the 
secret abode of wild beasts ’; and it is estimated that even in the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth one-third of England was in waste.”—Elton, op. cit., 
pp. 222-4. 
