Carlo Cipolla discusses wood and coal in modern England in Before
the Industrial Revolution (third edition), pp.268 - 270. I selected
the lines bellow for shortness, but Cipolla's whole discussion deserves a look:
..England was never a heavy wooded country. What forest there was
dwindled rapidly during the course of the sixteenth century, because
of a combined expansion of population; building activity and timber
consumption for domestic heating; shipbuilding; and production of
charcoal, which was the only known fuel for a number of industrial
processes. During the sixteenth century a number of Acts of
Parliament tried to suppress the cutting of timber for industrial
purposes. .... English historians tend to deny that there was a
timber crisis at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But what
was happening in the continent combined with a range of contemporary
English evidence demonstrate that there certainly was a quite severe
crisis. In 1548-9 the English government ordered an inquiry into the
consumption of timber by the iron foundries in Sussex...
..England increasingly resorted to the kind of fuel which was
abundant in the British isles.
Jaques Kerstenetzky