The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

The Cattle Ford, Liney Hill Wood.

Once the New Forest occupied nearly the entire south-west angle of Hampshire, stretching, when at its largest, in the beginning of the reign of Edward I., from the Southampton Water on the east, whose waves, the legend says, reproved the courtiers of Canute, to the Avon, and even, here and there, across it, on the west; and on the north from the borders of Wiltshire to the English Channel.

These natural boundaries were, as we shall see, reduced in that same reign. Since then encroachments on all sides have still further lessened its limits; and it now stretches, here and there divided by manors and private property, on the north from the village of Bramshaw, beyond Stoney Cross, near where Rufus fell, or was supposed to fall, to Wootton on the south, some thirteen miles; and, still further, from Hardley on the east to Ringwood, the Rinwede of Domesday, on the west.

In the year 1079, just thirteen years after the battle of Hastings, William ordered its afforestation. From Turner and Lingard down to the latest compiler, our historians have represented the act as one of the worst pieces of cruelty ever committed by an English sovereign. Even Lappenberg calls the site of the Forest “the most thriving part of England,” and says that William “mercilessly caused churches and villages to be burnt down within its circuit;”[9] and, in another place, speaks of the Conqueror’s “bloody sacrifice,” and “glaring cruelty towards the numerous inhabitants.”[10] To such statements in ordinary writers we should pay no attention, but they assume a very different aspect when put forward, especially in so unqualified a way, by a historian to whom our respect and attention are due. I have no wish to defend the character of William. He was one of those men whose wills are strong enough to execute the thoughts of their minds, ordained by necessity to rule others, holding firmly to the creed that success is the best apology for crime. Yet, too, he had noble qualities. Abroad he was feared by the bad, whilst at home such order prevailed throughout England, that a man might travel in safety “with his bosom full of gold” from one end to the other.[11]

What I do here protest against is the common practice of implicitly believing every tradition, of repeating every idle story which has been foisted into the text either by credulity or rancorous hatred—of, in fact, mistaking party feeling for history. The Chroniclers had every reason to malign William. His very position was enough. He had pressed with a heavy hand on the Old-English nobles, stripped them of their lands, their civil power, and their religious honours; and failing to learn, had, like a second Attila, tried to uproot their language.

The truth is, we are so swayed by our feelings that the most dispassionate writer is involuntarily biassed. We in fact pervert truth without knowing we do so. Language, by its very nature, betrays us. No historian, with the least vividness of style, can copy from another without exaggeration. The misplacement of a single word, the insertion of a single epithet, gives a different colour and tone. And, in this very matter of the New Forest, we need only take the various accounts, as they have come down, to find in them the evidences of their own untruth.[12]

I do not here enter into the question of William’s right to make the Forest—about this there can be no doubt—but simply into the methods which he employed in its formation.[13] The earliest Chronicler of the event, Gulielmus Gemeticensis, who has been so often quoted in evidence of William’s cruelty, both because he was a Norman, and chaplain to the King, really proves nothing. In the first place, the monk of Jumièges did not write this account, but some successor, so that the argument drawn from the writer’s position falls to the ground.[14] In the second place, his successor’s words are—“Many, however, say (ferunt autem multi) that the deaths of Rufus and his brother were a judgment from heaven, because their father had destroyed many villages and churches in enlarging (amplificandam) the New Forest.”[15] The writer offers no comment of his own, and simply passes over the matter, as not worth even refutation. His narrative, however, if it tells at all, tells against the common theory, as he states that William only extended the limits of a former chase.

The account of Florence of Worcester is, on the whole, equally unsatisfactory. His mention of the New Forest, like that, by the way, of most of the Chroniclers, does not occur in its proper place at the date it was made—when the wrong, we should have thought, must have been most felt—but is suggested by the death of Rufus, when popular superstition had come into play, and time had lent all the force of exaggeration to what must always have been an unpopular event. Florence,[16] however, speaks in general terms of men driven from their homes, of fields laid waste, and houses and churches destroyed: words which, as we shall see, carry their own contradiction. Vitalis,[17] too, not only declares that the district was thickly inhabited, but that it even regularly supplied the markets of Winchester, and that William laid in ruins no less than sixty parishes. Walter Mapes,[18] who flourished about the middle of the twelfth century, adds further that thirty-six mother churches were destroyed, but falls into the error of making Rufus the author of the Forest, which of course materially affects his evidence.

Knyghton,[19] however, who lived in the reign of Richard II., is doubtful whether the number of churches destroyed was twenty-two or fifty-two, an amount of difference so large that we might also reasonably suspect his narrative, whilst he also commits the mistake of attributing the formation of the Forest to Rufus.

Now, the first thing which strikes us is that as the writers are more distant in point of time, and therefore less capable of knowing, they singularly enough become more precise and specific. What Florence of Worcester speaks of in merely general terms, Vitalis, and Walter Mapes, and Knyghton, give in minute details down to the very number of the parishes and churches.[20]