Nottingham is well supplied with all materials necessary for building. The best of stone, lime, and wood are found here, and its early dwelling-places have in consequence been substantial and numerous. Mansfield, at the western extremity of Sherwood Forest, is a fine old country town, and still bears many traces of its ancient importance, though it has been much modernised. Sherwood Forest is the most celebrated feature in Nottinghamshire, and one of the most romantic parts of England. It is estimated to have been some twenty-five miles in length, and nearly eight broad in the times of Robin Hood, who would thus have about two hundred square miles to roam about in and kill deer. This popular outlaw has found a warm advocate across the channel in the person of Mons. Thierry, who recognises in him a sort of embodyment of popular feeling that existed against the singular severity of the Norman forest laws. There were at one time, it is said, over sixty Royal forests in England, all protected by laws of great cruelty. The celebrated Greendale Oak in Welbeck Park was quite a venerable tree in Robin Hood’s time. There is a coach road now through its stem. The “Parliament Oak,” in Clipstone Park, is so called because tradition asserts that King Edward I. called a parliament beneath its boughs. “The ancient date,” says Mr. Major, “may be illustrated by the fact, that when some of these trees were cut down at the latter end of the last century, letters denoting the king’s reign in which they were thus marked, were found stamped on them. One of these, eighteen inches beneath the surface of the tree, when it was felled in 1791, and more than a foot from the centre of the tree, bore the letters showing it had been marked in the reign of John (A.D. 1199); and allowing that it was a hundred years old when it was thus marked, it must have weathered seven centuries. This is probably the age of the oldest yet standing in the numerous parks, which still attest the dimensions of the good old forest of Sherwood.”