The beech, Fagus, is a great smooth-barked deciduous tree of European woods, casting so deep a shade that little grows beneath it. Its most striking piece of lore lies in language: the words for beech and for book are closely linked across the Germanic tongues, the same root gives the German Buche, beech, and Buch, book, because the early runic and letter inscriptions of the north were cut into tablets and staves of beech and other smooth woods. The beech is thus, etymologically, the tree of writing and of the written word.
Beech mast, the tree's small triangular nuts, was historically valuable enough to shape English forest law: the medieval right of pannage allowed commoners to turn pigs loose into beech and oak woodland each autumn to fatten on the fallen mast, a practice recorded in the Domesday Book and still formally exercised today in England's New Forest, where pigs are still driven into the forest each autumn under the same ancient legal right, a genuinely living medieval custom rather than a historical reenactment. The nuts themselves, mildly toxic in quantity to humans due to a compound called fagin, were nonetheless pressed for oil and eaten roasted in times of scarcity across pre-industrial Europe, a marginal but real food source from a tree more valued for shade, timber and its accidental gift of a word for writing.