Note 210 — Chapter III · (continued 2)

Holinshed, reprint of 1807, i, pp. 357, 358. It is evident from this passage, and from another on page 397 of the same volume, that, though sea coal was largely exported to the Continent, it had not yet come into general use in England. It is a question of much interest, when coal was first employed in England for fuel. I can find no evidence that it was used as a combustible until more than a century after the Norman conquest. It has been said that it was known to the Anglo-Saxon population, but I am acquainted with no passage in the literature of that people which proves this. The dictionaries explain the Anglo-Saxon word græfa by sea coal. I have met with this word in no Anglo-Saxon work, except in the Chronicle, A. D. 852, from a manuscript certainly not older than the twelfth century, and in that passage it may as probably mean peat as coal, and quite as probably something else as either. Coal is not mentioned in King Alfred's Bede, in Glanville, or in Robert of Gloucester, though all these writers speak of jet as found in England, and are full in their enumeration of the mineral products of the island.

England was anciently remarkable for its forests, but Cæsar says it wanted the fagus and the abies. There can be no doubt that fagus means the beech, which, as the remains in the Danish peat mosses show, is a tree of late introduction into Denmark, where it succeeded the fir, a tree not now native to that country. The succession of forest crops seems to have been the same in England; for Harrison, p. 359, speaks of the "great store of firre" found lying "at their whole lengths" in the "fens and marises" of Lancashire and other counties, where not even bushes grew in his time. We cannot be sure what species of evergreen Cæsar intended by abies. The popular designations of spike-leaved trees are always more vague and uncertain in their application than those of broad-leaved trees. Pinus, pine, has been very loosely employed even in botanical nomenclature, and Kiefer, Fichte, and Tanne are often confounded in German.—Rossmässler, Der Wald, pp. 256, 289, 324. If it were certain that the abies of Cæsar was the fir formerly and still found in peat mosses, and that he was right in denying the existence of the beech in England in his time, the observation would be very important, because it would fix a date at which the fir had become extinct, and the beech had not yet appeared in the island.

The English oak, though strong and durable, was not considered generally suitable for finer work in the sixteenth century. There were, however, exceptions. "Of all in Essex," observes Harrison, Holinshed, i, p. 357, "that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for ioiners craft: for oftentimes haue I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought hither out of Danske; for our wainescot is not made in England. Yet diuerse haue assaied to deale without [with our] okes to that end, but not with so good successe as they haue hoped, bicause the ab or iuice will not so soone be remoued and cleane drawne out, which some attribute to want of time in the salt water."

This passage is also of interest as showing that soaking in salt water, as a mode of seasoning, was practised in Harrison's time.

But the importation of wainscot, or boards for ceiling, panelling, and otherwise finishing rooms, which was generally of oak, commenced three centuries before the time of Harrison. On page 204 of the Liber Albus—a book which could have been far more valuable if the editor had given us the texts, with his learned notes, instead of a translation—mention is made of "squared oak timber," brought in from the country by carts, and of course of domestic growth, as free of city duty or octroi, and of "planks of oak" coming in in the same way as paying one plank a cartload. But in the chapter on the "Customs of Billyngesgate," pp. 208, 209, relating to goods imported from foreign countries, a duty of one halfpenny is imposed on every hundred of boards called "weynscotte," and of one penny on every hundred of boards called "Rygholt." The editor explains "Rygholt" as "wood of Riga." This was doubtless pine or fir. The year in which these provisions were made does not appear, but they belong to the reign of Henry III.