Broome keeps sheep from the rott, and is a medicine not long since found out by physitians for the dropsy. In some places I knew carefull husbandmen that quite destroyed their broome (as at Lanford), and afterwards their sheep died of the rott, from which they were free before the broom was cutt down; so ever since they doe leave a border of broome about their grounds for their sheep to browze on, to keep them sound. Furzes (genista spinosa).-I never saw taller or more flourishing English furzes than at Chalke. The Great Duke of Thuscany carried furzes out of England for a rarity in his magnificent garden. I never saw such dwarft furzes as at Bowdon parke; they did but just peep above the ground. Oakes (the best of trees).-We had great plenty before the disafforestations. We had in North Wiltshire, and yet have, though not in the former plenty, as good oakes as any in England. The best that we have now (1670) are at Okesey Parke, Sir Edward Poole’s, in Malmesbury hundred; and the oakes at Easton Piers (once mine) were, for the number, not inferior to them. In my great-grandfather Lite’s time (15—) one might have driv’n a plough over every oake in the oak-close, which are now grown stately trees. The great oake by the day-house [dairy house—J. B.] is the biggest oake now, I believe, in all the countie. There is a common wealth of rookes there. When I was a boy the two greatest oakes were, one on the hill at the parke at Dracot Cerne; the other at Mr. Sadler’s, at Longley Burrell. ’Twas of one of these trees, I remember, that the trough of the paper mill at Long-deane, in the parish of Yatton Keynell, anno 1636, was made. In Garsden Parke (now the Lord Ferrars) is perhaps the finest hollow oake in England; it is not high, but very capacious, and well wainscotted; with a little table, which I thinke eight may sitt round. When an oake is felling, before it falles, it gives a kind of shreikes or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq. hath heard it severall times. This gave the occasion of that expression in Ovid’s Metamorph. lib. viii. fab. ii. about Erisichthon’s felling of the oake sacred to Ceres:—“gemitumq{ue} dedit decidua quercus”. In a progresse of K. Charles I. in time of peace, three score and ten carts stood under the great oake by Woodhouse. It stands in Sir James Thinne’s land. On this oake Sir Fr. D—— hung up thirteen, after quarter. Woodhouse was a garrison for the Parliament. He made a sonn hang his father, or è contra. From the body of this tree to the extreme branches is nineteen paces of Captain Hamden, who cannot pace less than a yard. (Of prodigious trees of this kind you will see many instances in my Sylva, which Mr. Ray has translated and inserted in his Herbal.—J. EVELYN.)