Excerpt from Endeavour by Peter Moore, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

To Fisher's mind the country stood as a pivot between the virtuous homespun past and a bleak treeless future. To underscore his theme Fisher evoked a vision of yesteryear. He pictured a landowner, at one with nature, 'a little cloyed with enjoyment', and wishing 'to retire from business, or for the sake of meditation', taking a saunter in his spacious woodlands. This was the Horatian ideal, liberty from the cares and distractions of the city. Using the present tense to enhance the sense of loss, Fisher described how:

The variety of the scene revives his drooping spirits. On the branch of a full topt oak, at a small distance, the blackbird and thrush warble forth their notes, and, as it were, bless their benefactor. A little farther, the turtle dove, having lost his mate, sends forth his mournful plaint, till, by means of echo from a neighbouring wood, passing through the silent air, the happy pair are again united. Variety of changes draw on the pleasing hour amongst the massy bodies of the full-grown oaks and thriving plants. The prospect of his country's good warms his heart.3

Anticipating Rachel Carson's Silent Spring by two centuries, Roger Fisher was depicting the same vision of a paradise lost. Recent scholarship has indicated, though, that the oak problem was not as grave as he believed. Fisher may well have suffered a form of environmental panic, half seen, half felt, a type that would become increasingly prevalent in times ahead. In the 1760s attitudes like his masked a historical truth. In the mid-eighteenth century, as Thomas Fishburn went searching for faithful timber, there might not have been an abundance of oak – but there was still plenty left.

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Ancient, twisted, vast, with their goliath limbs outstretched, almost every English parish had its own loved oak, a timeless presence on the landscape. When the clergyman and naturalist Gilbert White started to document the natural history of Selborne in Hampshire in the 1760s, he set out with a description of the village oak. He wrote mournfully of a 'venerable' tree that had stood in the centre of Selborne on a green by the church. The oak had a 'short squat body, and huge horizontal arms extending almost to the extremity of the area'. For centuries it had been 'the delight of old and young'. Parishioners had surrounded it with stone steps, and had erected seats around it so that it had become 'a place of much resort in summer evenings'. The village elders had made it their custom to congregate at the Selborne oak 'in grave debate', while the young parishioners 'frolicked and danced before them'.4

A similar story came from White's contemporary, Reverend Sir John Cullum, who included a description of the parish oak in the opening paragraph of his History and Antiquities of Hawsted, and Hardwick (1784). Cullum wrote of 'a majestic tree' named the Gospel Oak that 'stood on an eminence, and commanded an extensive prospect'. On his annual 'perambulations' Cullum and his congregation would pause in the shade of the tree, and 'surveying a considerable extent of a fruitful and well-cultivated country, repeat some prayers proper for the occasion'.5 This image of the worshipful parishioners under the village oak is a vivid one, and Cullum was only doing what generations had done before him. A millennium before, the Anglo-Saxons had been buried in hollowed-out trunks of oak. People had pinned oak leaves to their jackets as signs of fealty and carried acorns in their pockets for luck.

If people recognised the oak's potency as a symbol, they venerated the tree equally for its strength. No tree could compete. A favourite classical tale told of Milo of Croton in ancient Greece. 'Renowned in history for his prodigious strength', explained a book in the 1760s, Milo was six times victor at the Olympic Games, 'he is said to have carried on his shoulders the whole length of a stadium an ox four years old; to have killed it with a single blow of his fist; and to have eaten the whole carcass in one day'.6 The story was subverted by Milo's demise. Having found an old oak, to flaunt his strength Milo had tried to rip it open with his hands. As he grasped the tree, it closed around him. In an instant the oak had transformed Greece's strongest man into its most tragic victim. Unable to free himself, a pack of wolves had emerged, tearing Milo to pieces.

Excerpted from Endeavour by Peter Moore. Copyright © 2019 by Peter Moore. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.