“1643. Quartering 20 soldiers one daie and night, going westward for the Parliamt service xvi.s. ij.d.
1646. For bringinge the toune cheste from Hurst Castell ij.s.
1646. Watche when the allarme was out of Wareham iiij.s.
1646. For the sending a messenger to the Lord Hopton, when he lay att Winton with his army, with the toune’s consent xiiij.s.
1648. For keeping a horse for the Lord General’s man iij.s. x.d.
1650. Paid to Sir Thomas Fairfax his souldiers going for the isle of Wight with their general’s passe xij.s.”

Such entries to an historian of the period would be invaluable, as showing not only the state of the country but of the town, when the town-chest had to be sent four miles for safety; and proving, too, that here (notice the fourth entry), as elsewhere, there were two nearly equally balanced factions—one for the King, the other for the Commonwealth. I may add that a little book has been privately printed, of extracts from the Lymington Corporation books, from which the foregoing have been taken. It would be a very good plan if those who have the leisure would render some such similar service in other boroughs.

[197]Warner’s Hampshire, vol. i., sect. ii., p. 6; London, 1795. See, too, previously, ch. xi., [p. 122], foot-note.

[198]See Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, vol. vi., part ii., p. 800. Tanner’s Notitia Monastica. Ed. Nasmyth, 1787. Hampshire. No. iv.

[199]I may seem to exaggerate both here and in the next chapter. I wish that I did. For similar cases in the neighbouring counties of Dorset and Sussex let the reader turn to the words “hag-rod,” “maiden-tree,” and “viary-rings,” in Mr. Barnes’s Glossary of the Dorset Dialect; and vol. ii. pp. 266, 269, 270, 278, of Mr. Warter’s Seaboard and the Down. I hesitate not to say that superstition in some sort or another is universal throughout England. It assumes different forms: in the higher classes, just at present, of spirit-rapping and table-turning, more gross than even those of the lower; and I am afraid really seems constitutional in our English nature.

[200]Of the extreme difficulty of classification of race in the New Forest I am well aware. I have, however, taken such typical families as Purkis, Peckham, Watton, &c., whose names are to be met in every part of the Forest, as my guide. Often, too, certain Forest villages, as Burley and Minestead, though far apart, have a strong connection with each other, and a family relationship may be traced in all the cottages. A good paper was read, touching upon the elements of the New Forest population, by Mr. D. Mackintosh, before the Ethnological Society, April 3rd, 1861. Of the Jute element, which we might have expected from Bede’s account of the large Jute settlement in the Isle of Wight, and Florence of Worcester’s language (as before, ed. Thorpe, vol. i., p. 276), few traces are to be found. See, however, on this point, what Latham says in his Ethnology of the British Isles, pp. 238, 239.

[201]See Dr. Guest’s paper on “The Early-English Settlements in South Britain,” Proceedings of the Archæological Institute, Salisbury volume, 1851, p. 30.

[202]This, of course, is not the place to go into so difficult a subject. I need not refer the reader to Mr. Davies’s paper in the Philological Society’s Transactions, 1855, p. 210, and M. de Haan Hettema’s Commentary upon it, 1856, p. 196. On the great value of provincialisms, see what Müller has said in The Science of Language, pp. 49-59. In [Appendix I.], I have given a list of some of those of the New Forest, which have never before been noticed in any of the published glossaries.

[203]In the charter of confirmation of Baldwin de Redvers to the Conventual House of Christchurch, quoted in Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, vol. iii., part i., p. 304, and by Warner, vol. ii., Appendix, p. 47, it is called Hedenes Buria, which may suggest that the word is only a corruption. I do not for one moment wish to insist on the personal reality of Hengest, but simply to notice the fact of the High-German word for a horse being prominent in the topography of a people whose ancestors used so many High-German words. See Donaldson, Cambridge Essays, 1856, pp. 45-48.

[204]On this word as explaining Shakspeare’s “gallow” in King Lear (act iii. sc. 2), see Transactions of the Philological Society, part i., 1858, pp. 123, 124.