COUNTRY LIFE
AFTER spending the day in the New Forest, which to my view is rather more lovely in winter than in summer, I turned into the Verderers' Court at Lyndhurst, which remains the capital of the Forest, in site as in organisation. It was a great pleasure to find the Court—the Court of Swainmote and Attachment—in session. There sat the Verderers in a row fronting the forbiddingly stiff chair in which offenders against the Forest law were seated when they came to judgement. The business was not of the grim order of the distant past. The Verderers, so far as I could make out, were deciding to make some dangerous barbed wire manifest to the public by decorating it with holly boughs. As no one responded to the question: " Are there any more present- ments ? " the public meeting came to an end. It is to be devoutly hoped that these old customs, and indeed words, are preserved. Plan- ning is the most popular of today's " boss words," but it seems to be quite forgotten by most of the planners that the longest, surest, best of plans is usually the continuation of the plans created not on theory, but by practice and trial in past history. A building without a founda- tion generally topples over.
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