10 inches in girth. For this tree Mr. Simmons told me, £100 was offered to make the keel of a ship forty or fifty years ago. It should live for many years, and may perhaps become the finest timber oak in Windsor Forest.
Mr. Menzies gives[1] an excellent explanation of the old custom of pollarding oaks and beeches, which has produced the picturesque veterans which are so common in most of our really old parks. For the support of the deer in winter it was customary to lop off the boughs of the oak and beech. The law required that no bough should be cut larger than a buck could turn over with its horns, and after they had been stripped by the deer these branches became the perquisite of the keepers, under the name of "fireboote," or "houseboote." Any timber fit for the navy could not be cut without the sign manual of the King, a rule yet extant; but in times of civil war, and in royal forests which were granted to favourites in the times of the Stuarts, the keepers often cut and sold as timber or firewood a great deal more than the deer needed; and notwithstanding that these matters were investigated by James I. with his national and personal thriftiness, and that the surveyors whom he employed were spoken of by the country people as "shroade and terrible men,"[2] these abuses increased to such a point that the growing scarcity of naval timber was a common complaint for centuries.
There is no doubt that browse or lop, being the natural winter food of deer in hard weather, is more suitable for them than beans and maize, which is now given in so many places probably to save trouble. I find in my own park that ash and elm are the favourites, and beech the next best lop for deer, and only give hay when the ground is frozen or covered with snow; but many parks are so overstocked with deer and with cattle in summer that in February and March the former must have some extra food, or a heavy death-rate follows.
Gloucestershire is not famous for fine oaks, though the Boddington Oak, near Tewkesbury, now gone, must have been an exceptionally large tree. The Newland Oak, near Coleford, is an immense pollard, with a short burry trunk no less than 43 feet in girth. An excellent photograph of it has been published as a postcard by Mr. J.W. Porter of Coleford. There are some fine ones in the Winchcombe Valley, near Sudeley Castle, one of which is 25½ feet in girth; but in the Vale of Gloucester elms are commoner than oaks, and I know none of special note, though Mr. J. R. Yorke tells me of a large tree still standing near Forthampton Court.
The largest I have seen are in Witcombe Park, the seat of W.H. Hicks-Beach, Esq., a small but picturesque park lying under the steep Birdlip Hill. Here on fertile clay soil, facing north and west, are a number of very fine trees, which, judging from the rings counted on one of the largest which has recently been felled, are not so old as they appear to be. This tree, which measured about 90 feet by 17½ feet, and contained 4oo to 500 cubic feet, was only about 210 years old, and beginning to fail in the upper branches, which were dying off. The largest tree, in a very exposed position, has lost some of its biggest limbs, and measures 25 feet in girth at about 5 feet from the ground, and 50 feet round the roots at the base. A very tall, well-shaped, handsome tree, with its bole clean and straight
