The Presidential Address.
29
arrival of the Soman 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.55 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
55 I am inclined 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 ?).
56 "It was a lands 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 Urus
was hunted in the northern forests. The work of reclaiming the wilder-
ness began in the days of Agricola. The Romans felled the woods along
the lines of their 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.