Beautiful England
Volumes Ready
| Oxford | The Heart of Wessex |
| The English Lakes | The Peak District |
| Canterbury | The Cornish Riviera |
| Shakespeare-Land | Dickens-Land |
| The Thames | Winchester |
| Windsor Castle | The Isle of Wight |
| Cambridge | Chester and the Dee |
| Norwich and the Broads | York |
Uniform with this Series | |
Beautiful Ireland | |
|---|---|
| LEINSTER | MUNSTER |
| ULSTER | CONNAUGHT |
| LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | |
|---|---|
| Page | |
| Gipsies at Coldharbour [Frontispiece] | |
| In Brockenhurst Village | [12] |
| Squatter’s Cottage | [16] |
| Boldre Bridge | [20] |
| The Mill Pond, Beaulieu | [26] |
| Buckler’s Hard | [30] |
| Lepe | [34] |
| “The Cathedral” | [40] |
| In Mallard Wood | [44] |
| Minstead Church | [48] |
| By Broomy Water | [52] |
| Burley Moor | [58] |
In these modern days, when towns are increasing on every side, and the new idea of garden cities threatens to swallow up what little is left us of the true country, it is good to remember that in one quiet corner of Hampshire lies a sanctuary, a little region set apart with its own laws and customs for over eight centuries for the preservation of wild life.
In our childhood we were taught to look upon the deed of Norman William with horror, as an iniquity perpetrated by an inhuman conqueror, and we spouted in the words of good Miss Smedley:
“Oh Forest! green New Forest! Home of the bird and breeze,
With all thy soft and sweeping glades, and long, dim aisles of trees,
Like some ancestral palace thou standest proud and fair;
Yet is each tree a monument to death and wild despair.”
Now we have come to bless his name as one of the greatest of our benefactors. Moreover, the scientific historian has been at work, and has completely demolished the legend. The serious student may be referred to Wise’s History of the New Forest, where he will find the evidence thoroughly sifted; for this slight story it will be enough to gather up the results. To begin with, the Saxon name of Ytene, by which the district was known before it became the New Forest, denotes a furzy waste, as much of it is to this day—“hungry uplands and marshy valleys”—and the fact that, although traces of Roman occupation are found on the borders, and Roman roads seem to have crossed it, no Roman villa has been unearthed within its precincts, goes far to prove that this could have been no smiling land of plenty, or the invaders would surely have settled in a spot lying so handy to the seacoast. Buckland Camp, on its southern confines near Lymington, shows that they had it in possession, and to this stronghold the British general, Natan Leod, fell back when driven from Calshot Castle by the Saxons. His Roman name of Ambrosius is found in Ampress Farm hard by.
Probably Canute, who had his capital at Winchester, and was much at Southampton, had a chase here, for he, like Norman William, was a mighty hunter, as the stringency of his forest laws testifies.
Regarding the size and nature of the district, neither churches nor villages could have been much more numerous than at the present day, and as some of the former, still standing, are mentioned in “Domesday Book”, the wholesale destruction of the old Chronicles must have been grossly exaggerated. When William annexed the district to the Crown, he most likely chose it because the greater part was wild already, and the afforestation simply meant that he placed it under forest law with a separate administration. Cases of hardship there doubtless were; though there is record of compensation being paid to some dispossessed owners, the smaller men may have suffered, and these being Saxons, bitter feeling against the Conqueror was engendered, and as time went on tales of cruelty grew to legends, especially after the violent deaths of William’s sons in the forest, held by the common people to be the judgment of God.
The whole tract taken by the king was about the size of the Isle of Wight, a triangle, roughly speaking, lying between Southampton Water on the east and the River Avon on the west, its base being the Solent shore, and its apex running up into Wiltshire at Nomansland. Since then its boundaries have been narrowed, passing a mile or two within Southampton Water, from Cadnam through Dibden Purlieu, touching the Solent at Stone Point and
leaving it again at Pitt’s Deep, cutting the Lymington Road at Passford, and going by Meadend Bridge round by the Avon Valley, along the rampart of high down to Breamore, where it joins the old northern border. It has been further diminished by the grant of manors to private owners and to Beaulieu Abbey, and by encroachments of various sorts.
To the town-dweller forest usually bears the prime signification of trees; he thinks of a forest as a wood of large extent, interrupted possibly by an occasional clearing: to the forester it means a great tract of moorland, holding in its bosom many wooded enclosures, many “lawns”, as he calls the lightly wooded slopes, many long, marshy “bottoms” or valleys dividing the heaths. The dictionary meaning is just open ground reserved for the chase, and the derivation is given as foras: out of doors.
The two prime interests of the forest were “venison and vert”—deer for the chase and wood for the dockyard—and for the due administration of these a Lord Warden was appointed, usually a nobleman, sometimes a royal prince, and under him two Rangers, one for each branch of Forest Law. The fifteen Walks into which the Forest was, and is still, divided were placed under fifteen Keepers, men of position who inhabited the forest lodges—“elegant mansions”, according to Mr. Gilpin. Under them
again were the Groom-keepers, whose duty it was to browse the deer, to harbour a fat buck for the chase, to impound and mark the cattle and ponies, and to present offenders at the Swainmote, whether deer-stealers or encroachers on forest land. They had an old distich for their guidance in the former case:
“Stable stand; dog draw;
Back bear and bloody hand”.
This meant that a man found lurking in a suspicious position, or one with a dog pursuing a stricken deer, one carrying a carcass or with blood on his hands, was liable to be haled before the Swainmote, charged with deer-stealing.
A Woodward, with ten Regarders under him, saw to the planting, cutting, and preservation of the timber, and also assigned wood and peat to those who enjoyed chimney rights. It is interesting to find these rights extended to the forests of northern France by Henry of Lancaster after those victories which caused him to arrogate to himself and his successors the title of “Rex Angliæ et Franciæ”. Some of these wood rights were limited to the dead wood a man could reach with a crooked stick: hence the expression, “by hook or by crook”. A Purveyor was also appointed on behalf of Portsmouth Dockyard to claim the timber needed for His Majesty’s ships.
Besides these officials, six Verderers were chosen by the freeholders and one by the king to sit in the Swainmote and uphold Forest rights.
Now, since it has become the property of the Crown instead of the king—quite a different thing—the administration has been altered and the officials are much fewer: it has been placed under the Department of Woods and Forests, represented by a Deputy Surveyor, but the Verderers still meet six times a year at the King’s House to maintain the rights of the commoners.
And now the two main objects of the afforestation have nearly come to an end: neither venison nor vert are of their old importance. The deer had encroached so much on the foresters’ rights, that their extinction was decreed; a few yet linger in the north and west, but the Forest is no longer for them. Moreover, since we have ceased to trust in the “wooden walls of Old England”, the demand for sound oak timber is shrinking, and once in the utilitarian days of the last century it was seriously proposed to throw the whole district open for cultivation. Happily there were enough lovers of nature to save it, and it is still preserved as a bit of the wild country our forefathers enjoyed.
For the Forest has a peculiar charm which I would fain convey. Where does it lie? Just where it is
least sought; where the cheap tripper complains there is nothing to see. Not by Rufus’ Stone; not in the drear formality of the Ornamental Drive; hardly under the big trees where picnic parties leave their sandwich papers and banana skins: rather where the brown rivulet winds its hidden way between the rushes; beside the dark pool lying in the hollow of the moor with deep, shadowy reflections of its fringe of trees and just a glint of blue sky between; or along the green rides where the wood seems endless; or on the high shoulder of the wide, lonely moor, sloping away, fold beyond fold, to the distant sea, with all its wondrous changeful hues, bronze and russet with bracken, purple with heather, with sweeps of ling tenderly grey—yet most beautiful, perhaps, when the amethyst dusk has swallowed up all shades, and the dark crest lies against the fading glow of sunset. The palpitating song of the lark, that all day filled the sky with music, is hushed, and the tawny owls, with their soft flight like huge moths, swoop across, calling to each other with their long tu-whoo.