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Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer is set in Athens but the funeral pyre of Arcite there is adorned with the trees of England rather than those of ancient Greece—“ook, firre, birch, aspe, alder, holm, popler”—in a refrain which was in turn adopted by Spenser in the first book of
The Fairie
Queene
where “the builder Oake,” “the Firre that weepeth still” and “the Birch for shaftes” are among “the trees so straight and hy.” For Spenser in the late sixteenth century the trees prompt mythical longings, as if their ancient guardians might still be summoned by the vatic tone of English epic. The hawthorn was the home of fairies, and the hazel offered protection against enchantment; the great oak itself descended into the other world. It is Milton’s “monumental Oke.” As a child William Blake saw angels inhabiting the trees of Peckham Rye; as a child, too, his disciple, Samuel Palmer, was entranced by the shadows of an elm tree cast by the moon upon an adjacent wall. Wordsworth stood beneath an ash tree in the moonlight and was vouchsafed visions
    Of human Forms with superhuman Powers.
    The same poet saw among yew trees “Time the Shadow,” and wrote other verses upon “The Haunted Tree.”
    The magical talismans of Puck, in Rudyard Kipling’s
Puck of Pook’s Hill
, are the leaves of the oak, the thorn and the ash which afford the children access to earlier times. As the Roman poet Lucan apostrophised the Druids of the English isle in the first century—“To you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest.” In
Piers the Plowman
, composed in the fourteenth century, the divine edict of a later god ensures that “Beches and brode okes were blowen to the grounde.”
    These sources fill with vigour and energy the legends of Robin Hood, hiding himself among the trees of Sherwood Forest; he may be descended from the English imp Robin Goodfellow, but he is more akin to the formidable figure of the Green Man. The fable may have begun in 1354 with the incarceration of a “Robin Hood” for the poaching of venison in the forest of Rockingham, but no local or secular origin can account for the power which this green figure among the trees has been granted.
    By 1377 the “rymes of Robyn Hood” were as familiar as household tales, and as late as the sixteenth century the local festivals of the Thames and Severn Valleys, and of Devon, were still associated with plays of Robin Hood. It is not necessarily an old, or forgotten, piety. In
Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence’s twentieth-century characters Ursula and Birkin drive among “great old trees.” “ ‘Where are we?’ she whispered. ‘In Sherwood Forest.’ It was evident he knew the place.” He knew it spiritually, atavistically. “ ‘We will stay here,’ he said, ‘and put out the lights.’ ”
    And then in the darkness they may have seen the Ash Tree of Existence, the Tree of Jesse and the Golden Bough. The Tree of Jesse was “the first design to be integrated in England to fill a large window.” 1 As part of the mournful decorations upon English tombstones, shields hang from trees. The palm-tree vault in Wells Chapter House, begun c. 1290, endures as a memorial of sacred stone beyond the depredations of rain and wind and frost. In the biblical narrative of the
Cursor Mundi
, composed in English in the early fourteenth century, there are holy trees which owe more to English folklore than to biblical tradition; a heavenly light shines upon them, and they have an innate virtue which wards off evil and heals sickness. In an old English carol Jesus talks to a tree while still in his mother’s womb, and images of the cross in English art are generally those of a lopped tree-trunk. In
The Dream of the Rood
, a meditation upon the Crucifixion of Christ, the tree speaks:
    ic waes aheawen holtes on ende . . .

Rod waes ic araered . . .

eall ic waes mid blode