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    “I was cut down, roots on end . . .
I was raised up, as a rood . . .
I was all wet with blood.”
    Some lines from this Anglo-Saxon tree poem were carved in runes upon the great Ruthwell Cross, one of the English stone crosses which create a sacred topography of the nation. The Ruthwell inscription can be dated to the late seventh century, while in its surviving state the poem is believed to derive from eighth-century Northumbria; yet still the stone speaks, and the tree sighs.
    On the territorial charters of Anglo-Saxon kings a hawthorn tree is generally employed as a boundary marker; it becomes the root of time and space, as a measure of continuity and ownership. In
The Child that Books Built
Francis Spufford remarks that “there was a forest at the beginning of fiction, too. This one spread for ever.” 2 The tree encloses a communal memory—“beyond the memory of anyone now living,” as the medieval rubric was later to express it—and from it derives that sense of place, of literal rootedness, which is one of the great themes of the English imagination.
    So in
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot describes a country town “which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree.” In “The Hollow Tree” John Clare, the nineteenth-century poet who laboured with the land, celebrates the “battered floor” of an anciently hollowed and hallowed ash:
    But in our old tree-house rain as it might Not one drop fell although it rained all night
    Constable claimed that he could see Gainsborough “in every hedge and hollow tree”; the remark expresses an identification with the offspring of the earth itself, that local genius or deity to which we are bound and towards which we ineluctably travel. Of Gainsborough’s landscapes, of trees and forests in profusion, Constable also wrote: “on looking at them we find tears in our eyes and know not what brought them.” Gainsborough himself remarked that there “was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of any beauty . . . that I did not treasure in my memory from earliest years.” And what of Constable’s own paintings? “The trees,” he wrote, “... seem to ask me to try and do something like them.” An enthusiast once created an enclosure in which were to be planted all the trees of Shakespeare’s plays.
    The destruction of trees creates dismay and bewilderment among the English poets. When Clare’s favourite elm trees were condemned, he explained that “I have been several mornings to bid them farewell.” There is an English legend of a dying stag, sobbing when for the last time it enters its own familiar glade; this, too, is part of the
genius loci
. When Gerard Manley Hopkins watched an ash tree cut down, “there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of this world destroyed any more.” “Inscape” is of Anglo-Saxon derivation, from “
sceap
” meaning creation with a passing obeisance to “
instaepe
” or threshold. The ash represents a threshold of creation, for Hopkins in the nineteenth century no less than for the ancient priests of Britain. There is, here, a continuity. In sixteenth-century tapestry the antlers of stags resemble the trees upon a hill-side, as if all nature were animated by one aspiring spirit; fifteenth-century English mystics saw trees as men walking, a vision recalled by Tolkien in his legend of moving trees or Ents in
The Lord of the Rings
. “Ents” derives from the Old English word meaning “giants.” Tolkien also refers to them as the “shepherds of the trees,” thus reintroducing the shepherd as another figure beloved in the English imagination.
    It was remarked of Thomas Hardy, in 1883, that he “is never more reverent, more exact, than when he is speaking of forest trees.” The tree represents life itself, and his characters are often identified by it. There is, for example, Gabriel Oak in
Far from the Madding Crowd
.