Antique Illustration of British Trees - An Old Beech Tree circa 1820

An antique illustration of an old Beech Tree at the Oaks, Surrey, taken from a lithograph first published circa 1820.

When this map was published:

What Life Was Like - The Year 1000

"Ploughland, pasture, and woodland - in the year 1000 the forests were farmed like fields. Wood was the fuel of the times, & it was also the principal building material, the substance of choice for every sort of household implement & repair. Technically the first millennium fell in the Iron Age, but when it came to the texture of everyday life it was much more the Age of Wood.

The word carpenter is said to have come from the admiration which the Romans felt for the fine & sturdy two-wheeled cart developed by the Celtic woodworkers of ancient Britain. The Romans called it a "carpentum" & those who were skilled at making such carts - or who used the wood transported in them - became known as carpenters.

People ate off wood. Anglo-Saxon evacuations show many more wooden platters than earthenware plates. People drank from ash or alder wood cups that were turned on a foot-pedalled pole lathe...a simple but effective piece of self-powered technology that was still in use in English woodworking shops on the eve of the Second World War.

The forest was the mysterious home were the ancient spirits of the woodland lived. People foraged for firewood there. The leaves provided winter bedding for cattle. It's charcoal pits supplied high intensity fuel for blacksmiths. The forest was a place of refuge when the Vikings came, & in famine it was the larder of the last resort. But most of all, in the year 1000, the farmed coppices of England's woodlands provided timber for the increasing numbers of towns being built all over the country."