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THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
Mr. Buxton replied, and expressed the hope that such a meeting of inspection
by the Club would be an annual fixture. He also gave many details of his work,
which are mainly embodied io the preceding paragraphs. Mr. Buxton
alluded to the difficulties he had experienced in an endeavour to transplant
seedlings from Epping Forest to Hainhault, When the seedlings were taken up
free from earth they mostly died, but when a small clod of their native earth was
transplanted with the seedlings, they stood the process well. He was also
puzzled at the absence of the beech from Hainhault; much of the higher ground
was superficially like some parts of Epping Forest where the beech flourished,
and yet the tree was not found growing on it.
Prof. Fisher also spoke, and his special remarks on Hainhault are summarised
in like manner in this report. He gave some most interesting information on
the history and methods of management of Continental Forest. He said that
when we considered the magnificent State Forests which were still found in
nearly all European countries except the British Isles, and remembered that
there Were enormous areas of Crown forests in Britain under the Plantagenet
kings, it was sad to feel that most of these woodlands were alienated by our
former sovereigns, either by gift, or by sale for inadequate supplies of ready
money. The first King of England who showed the slightest wish to maintain
our English woods was James I., who ordered that oak trees in the Royal
forests should no longer be lopped. It had been the practice to pollard most of
the trees in order to supply fodder to the deer during winter, as they browsed on
the bark of the lopped branches, and when the latter were stripped of bark the
wood was appropriated by the keepers. There were in Windsor Forest
scarcely any oak trees more than two hundred years old that had not been
pollarded.
The Forest of Dean appeared always to have been looked upon as a source of
supply of oak for our Navy, and in one of the captured ships of the Spanish
Armada, an order of Philip, King of Spain, was found, directing an expedition to
be sent, after the Spanish Army had landed in England, to devastate that
forest in the interests of Spain. By the reign of James I. the original vast
supplies of wood from the Weald were becoming exhausted, and companies were
started to make glass with coal instead of with wood fuel. There were still,
however, plenty of hedgerow and coppice oaks in England, mostly in private
hands ; and the first important oak plantations in the New Forest were made by
William III., who, as a Dutchman, recognised the necessity for a permanent
supply of oak for the Navy. The old Duchess of Marlborough, who was Ranger
of Windsor Forest for a long period, made some oak plantations, and her trees
were properly grown, mixed with beech, and were now nearly two hundred
years old, and probably the finest oak trees in Britain. Similar fine oaks, grown
with beech, were formerly plentiful in the Forest of Dean, but for some reason or
other the use of beech as a nurse to the oak was discontinued ; and when, after
the Napoleonic Wars, about £300,000 was voted by Parliament for planting oaks
in the Crown forests, they were planted without any help from beech, and large
areas of these branchy, poor oaks, now about eighty years old, may be seen in all
our existing Crown woodlands.
Continental rulers were much less wasteful with their forests, although they
were quite as great hunters of the deer as our own sovereigns. To take France
as an example. In 1665 Colbert, the Finance Minister of Louis XIV., saw the
necessity for maintaining a supply of Oakwood for the French Navy. "La