[27] Translated from
Templa adimit divis, fora civibus, arva colonis,
an old monkish writer, I forget who.—Pope.
[28] Alluding to the destruction made in the New Forest, and the tyrannies exercised there by William I.—Pope.
I have the authority of three or four of our best antiquarians to say, that the common tradition of villages and parishes, within the compass of thirty miles, being destroyed, in the New Forest, is absolutely groundless, no traces or vestiges of such being to be discovered, nor any other parish named in Doomsday Book, but what now remains.—Warton.
The argument from Doomsday Book is of no weight if, as Lingard asserts, the New Forest was formed before the registration took place. William was an eager sportsman. "He loved the beasts of chase," says the Saxon chronicle, "as if he had been their father," and the source of his love was the pleasure he took in killing them. His hunting grounds, however, were ample without the New Forest, and Thierry thinks that his motive in forming it may have been political. The wooded district, denuded of a hostile population, and stretching to the sea, would have afforded shelter to the Normans in the event of a reverse, and enabled them to disembark in safety.
[29] Addison's Campaign:
O'er prostrate towns and palaces they pass,
Now covered o'er with weeds, and hid in grass.
[30] Donne, in his second Satire,
When winds in our ruined abbeys roar.—Wakefield.