The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

Had there been any buildings destroyed, all ruins of them would not have been quite effaced, even in the course of eight centuries. The country has been undisturbed. Nature has not here, as in so many places, helped man in his work of destruction. They cannot, we know, have been built on, or ploughed over, or silted with sand, or choked with mud, or washed away by water. The slightest artificial bank, though ever so old, can be here instantly detected. The Keltic and West-Saxon barrows still remain. The sites of the dwellings of the Britons are still plainly visible. The Roman potteries are untouched, and their vessels and cups, though lying but a few inches under the ground, unbroken. We can only very fairly conclude that, had there been houses, or villages, or churches destroyed, all traces of them would not be gone, nor entirely lost in the preserving record of local names.

It has, I am aware, been urged that since the Old-English churches were chiefly built of wood, we are not likely to find any ruins. This may be so. But by no process of reasoning can the absence of a thing prove its former presence. Nor need we pay any attention to the argument drawn from such names as Castle Malwood, The Castle near Burley, Castle Hill on the banks of the Avon, Lucas Castle, and Broomy and Thompson Castles in Ashley Walk. These Castles are of the air—mere names, invented, as in other parts of England, by the popular mind. At Castle Malwood there is the simple trench of a camp, and recent excavations there showed no traces of buildings; whilst the Castle at Burley, and Castle Hill, and the others, were merely earthen fortifications and entrenchments, made by the Kelts and West-Saxons. Nor must we be led away by the few Forest names ending in ton, the Old-English tún, which, after all, means more often only a few scattered homesteads than even a village, still less a town or city, in the modern sense of the word.[32]

If, however, we look at the district from another point of view, we shall find further evidence against the Chroniclers. It was a part of the Natan Leaga[33]—a name still preserved in the various Netleys, Nateleys, and Nutleys, which remain—the Ytene of the British, that is, the furzy district, a title eminently characteristic of the soil.[34] Again, too, the villages and manors, such as Lyndhurst, Brockenhurst, Ashurst, and half a dozen more hursts, point to the woody nature of the place. Such names, also, as Roydon, the rough ground; Bramshaw, the bramble wood; Denny, the furzy ground; Wootton, the Odetune of Domesday; Stockeyford and Stockleigh, the woody place; Ashley, the ash ground;[35] besides Staneswood, Arnwood, and Testwood, all more or less afforested in Domesday, clearly show its character.

After all, the best evidence is not from such arguments, but in the simple fact that the New Forest remains still the New Forest. Had the land been in any way profitable, modern skill, and capital, and enterprise, would have certainly been attracted. But its charms lie not, and never did, in the richness of its soil, but in its deep woods and wild moors.[36]

Our view of the matter, then, is that William, like all Normans, loving the chase—loving, too, the red deer, as the Old-English Chronicler, with a sneer, remarks, as if he was their own father—converted what was before a half-wooded tract, a great part of which he held in demesne, inherited by right of being king, into a Royal Forest, giving it the name of the New Forest, in contradistinction to its former title of Ytene. To have laid waste a highly-cultivated district for the purposes of the chase, as the Chroniclers wish us to believe, would have defeated his chief object, as there would have been no shelter then, nor for many years to come, for the deer: and is contradicted, as we have seen, both by Domesday, by the very nature of the soil, and the names of the places.

The real truth is, that the stories, which fill our histories, of William devastating the country, burning the houses, murdering the people, have arisen from a totally wrong conception of an ancient forest. Until this confusion of an old forest with our modern ideas is removed, we can have no clear notions on the subject. We must remember that an ancient forest did not simply mean a space thickly covered with trees, but also wild open ground, with lawns and glades. Its derivation points out to what sort of places it was originally applied.[37] The word hurst, too, which, as we have seen, is so common a termination throughout the district, means a wood which produces fodder for cattle, answering to the Old High-German spreidach.[38] The old forests possessed, if not a large, some scattered population. For them a special code of laws was made, or rather gradually developed itself. Canute himself appointed various officers—Primarii, our Verderers; Lespegend, our Regarders; and Tinemen, our Keepers. The offences of hunting, wounding, or killing a deer, striking a verderer or regarder, cutting vert, are all minutely specified in his Forest Law, and punished, according to rank and other circumstances, with different degrees of severity.[39] The Court of Swanimote was, in a sense, counterpart to the Courts of Folkemote and Portemote in towns. A forest was, in fact, a kingdom within a kingdom, with certain, well-defined laws, suited to its requirements, and differing from the common law of the land. The inhabitants had regular occupations, enjoyed, too, rights of pasturing cattle, feeding swine, and cutting timber.[40] All this, as we have seen, went on as before, not so much, but still the same, in the New Forest. Manors, too, with the exception of being subject to Forest Law, remained in the heart of it unmolested. According to the Chroniclers themselves, some rustics living on the spot convey, with a horse and cart, the bleeding body of Rufus to Winchester. According to them[41] also the King, previous to his death, must have feasted, with his retinue of servants, and huntsmen, and priests, and guests, somewhere in the Forest, implying means in the neighbourhood to furnish, if not the luxuries, the necessities of life. In Domesday we find, too, a keeper of the king’s house holding the mill at Efford; also implying, at least, in a very different part of the Forest, a neighbourhood which could not have been quite destitute and deserted.[42] At a later period, when the Forest Laws had reached their climax of oppression, persons in the Forest, as we learn from Blount and the Testa de Nevill, hold their lands at Lyndhurst and Eyeworth,[43] by finding provisions for the king and fodder for his horse. But more than all, Domesday, corroborated as it is by the physical characteristics of the country, by the evidence, too, of local names, by the Norman doorways, and pillars and arches at Fawley, and Brockenhurst and Milford, proves most distinctly—and most distinctly because so circumstantially—that the district was neither devastated, nor the houses burnt, nor the churches destroyed, nor the people murdered.

Some wrong, though, was doubtless committed: some hardships undergone. Lands, however useless, cannot be afforested without the feelings of the neighbourhood being outraged. And the story, gathering strength in proportion as the Conqueror and his son William the Red were hated by the conquered, at last assumed the tragical form which the Chroniclers have handed down to us, and modern historians repeated.

William’s cruelty, however, lay not certainly in afforesting the district: it consisted rather in the systematic way in which he strove to reduce the English into abject slavery; in the fresh tortures with which he loaded the Danish Forest Laws; and in making it far better to kill a man than a deer. For these exactions was it that his family paid the penalty of their lives; and the retribution befel them there, where the superstitious West-Saxon would, above all others, have marked out as the spot fitted for their deaths.

View in Gibb’s Hill Wood.