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to clear a line of march by cutting down the trees that blocked the way. The sound of 80,000 axes, he says, might have been heard at one and the same time, and he adds that the trees were burned as they fell. Such statements may be taken for what they are worth as the conventional phrases of historians aiming at the picturesque or at magnifying the deeds of their heroes. Æneas Sylvius, at all events, speaking of the country between Berwick and Edinburgh in the reign of James I., says that he found it "destitute" of wood; and, at a much later date (1598), an English visitor, Fynes Moryson, tells us that even in Fife, one of the most highly-cultivated districts in the Scotland of that day, "trees are so rare, as I remember not to have seen one wood." 10

The testimony of these visitors is fully borne out by the evidence of legislation. In 1535, seven years before the accession of Mary, a law was passed ordaining every person, spiritual and temporal, possessed of a hundred pound land, to plant woods or orchards to the extent of three acres round their domiciles. Similar statutes had been passed since the reign of James II., but the new statute went beyond all previous ones in the stringency of its enactments. Besides his own obligation, the proprietor was to compel his tenants to plant one tree for every merk-land which they held of him. The same Parliament, which sat in 1535, imposed a heavy penalty on

all persons convicted of doing injury to green wood: for the first offence the fine was to be ten pounds Scots; for the second, twenty; for the third, death." In the reign of Mary many of her subjects were put to serious inconvenience by a law that had recently been passed in Denmark. By this law all Danish subjects were forbidden to sell oak to Scottish traders "-an embargo which we know from later testimony would have put an end to house-building in Scotland. The desperate straits to which Scotland was driven for lack of timber is oddly proved by a suggestion of James VI. to his Privy Council. This sage proposal was to prohibit the exportation of Scottish timber; and the Council had to remind his Majesty that within the memory of man no timber had been exported from Scotland, and that, if foreign countries were to adopt a retaliatory policy, Scotland would have the worst of the bargain.

Writing in 1617, the year of James VI.'s visit to his native kingdom, Sir Anthony Weldon declared that Judas could not have found a tree in Scotland on which to hang himself." But this was only one of the senseless gibes of that splenetic Southron. The evidence is conclusive, indeed, that throughout the southern half of the country wood was so scarce as to give its distinctive character to the landscape. But even in the time of Mary trees were not so absolutely nonexistent as Weldon would have us believe.

Successive Acts of Parliament, we have seen, had made it compulsory for landlords to rear plantations in the immediate neighbourhood of their seats; and we have the testimony of visitors that such plantations were frequently to be seen, especially in Fife and the Lothians. Of woods on a larger scale to be found in different parts of the country, also, we have conclusive evidence. In Fife, for example, there was the forest of Falkland, described as a "sylva nobilis "; " between East Lothian and Berwickshire there was a wood which is described as extending from the coast inland to a distance of three miles; and in Galloway there were the woods of Cree, Kenmure, and Garlies. 16 According to Bishop Leslie, who speaks from personal knowledge, woods were not infrequent throughout the whole border country, and the same writer informs us that both Upper and Lower Clydesdale abounded in "fair forrests and schawis schene." " We have further the testimony of an English traveller that considerable remains of the Ettrick Forest still existed in the times of Mary, and the same witness reports that there were "good woods" in the valley of the Dumfriesshire Esk.

If timber was scarce in the Lowlands, it could in considerable measure be supplied by the Highlands.18 The somewhat legendary Caledonian Forest of the Roman historians had indeed in great measure disappeared, and of the Tor Wood,

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which, according to Bishop Leslie, extended from Callander to Lochaber," only a scanty remnant remained by the time of Mary, but we have definite contemporary evidence that in many parts of the Highlands there were genuine forests covering large tracts of country. There were, for example, extensive woods round Loch Ness; there was the Royal Forest of Clunie which clothed the mountains forming the borderlands of Glenmoriston and Kintail; and so richly timbered were the shores of Loch Maree that ironworks were established there as early at least as the beginning of the seventeenth century." The sale of timber, indeed, which was conveyed to the nearest burghs by the rivers, waters and lochs, was already, together with the trade in cattle, one of the profitable industries of the Highlandsfor, though it is mainly Highland creaghs that are recorded in history, much honest business was really done between the Gael and the Sassenach.23

Besides the general absence of wood in the Lowlands there were other features in the landscape which distinguished the Scotland of the sixteenth century from the Scotland of to-day. Everywhere there were numerous mosses, lochans, and even lochs, which have long since disappeared, and the disappearance of which has materially altered the general aspect of the country. To take but one example; in Blaeu's map of Fife there are some

twenty lochs or lochans, several of them as large as the present Loch Leven, of which there is little or no trace at the present day. It was in consequence of the numerous mosses and waters in the flat country that the slopes of the hills were so generally cultivated by the Scots-a custom which the Southern visitors regarded as one of the peculiarities of our remarkable country. Long after the time of Mary an Englishman thus refers to the custom: ""Tis almost incredible," he says, "how much of the mountains they plough, where the declensions, I had almost said the precipices, are such that to our thinking it puts them to greater difficulty and charge to carry on their work than they need be at in draining the valleys." 24

Another peculiarity that struck the English visitor to Scotland in the latter half of the sixteenth century was the total absence of enclosures throughout the length and breadth of the country. As is well known, the term "enclosures" is one of sinister import in English history. In the economical development of England the landlords had found it profitable to turn the greater part of their estates into pasture for sheep, and these "enclosures," as they were called, inflicted widespread misery alike on the small farmers and the agricultural labourers. Of "enclosures" in this sense we hear little in connection with the Scotland of the sixteenth century. When our English visitors speak of the

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