The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

The Avon at Winkton.

CHAPTER XIII.
CHRISTCHURCH.

The Priory Church from the Castle Keep.

I have determined to give a chapter to Christchurch, not because it contains more than many another town, but because it is a fair representative of the generality of small English boroughs. There is not a town in England, dating from even the Middle Ages, which is not full of interest peculiarly its own, and which does not possess memorials of the past which no other place can show. It has been proposed, by a no mean authority, to teach history by paintings and cartoons. But history is already painted for us on our city walls, and written for us upon our gates and crumbling castles. Our towns are in themselves the best texts upon history. For what we have seen with our eyes, and touched with our hands, leaves a more vivid and more lasting impression than the closest study of libraries of histories.

Further, the picture of a mediæval town, as given in its own archives, with its own legislation, its peculiar manufacture, or import, forms, to some extent, the true social picture of the times. Its history reflects—and not faintly—the history of the day. Christchurch was never a town of sufficient importance to show all this in its municipal records. Yet, too, we shall see that they in another way are, like the town itself, full of interest. From a modern point of view there is nothing to be seen beyond three or four straggling streets and its manufactory of fusee watch-chains—the only one in England. All its interest and associations lie with the past. The country round it, too, is equally bound up with that same past. To the north rises St. Catherine’s Hill, which we saw from the valley of the Avon, with its oval and square camps, and rampart and double vallum, crested with the mounds of its Roman watch-towers. The river Stour winds along between rows of barrows. Hengistbury Head is still fortified by its vast earthworks, and entrenched by deep ditches from the Avon to the sea.[156] Here the Britons saw the first swarm of fugitive Belgæ land and spread themselves along the rich valleys of Dorsetshire.[157] Here, centuries afterwards, the West-Saxons watched the raven—standard of the Danes scouring down the Channel, and knew their course along the coast, at night, by the blaze of burning villages, and, in the day, by the black trail of smoke.[158]

But to return to the town. Its Old-English names, Tweonea and Twinham-burn, were given to it from its situation between the rivers Avon and Stour. They were afterwards corrupted into the Norman Thuinam; which was lost in the name of its Priory, overshadowing the town with its magnificence.

Here, in 901, came Æthelwald the Ætheling, son of Æthered, in his rebellion against his cousin Edward the Elder, and seized the place. From Christchurch he fell back upon Wimborne, which he fortified, exclaiming he would do one of two things, “Either there live, or there lie.” That same night he fled to Northumberland.[159]

From Domesday we find that its manor was held in demesne by the Conqueror, as also by Edward the Confessor, with a mill renting for 5s., whilst another, belonging to the Church, was worth but 30d., and that thirty-one tenements in the borough paid a rent of 16d. Its woods, only, were inclosed in the Forest.

The manor remained in the hands of the Crown till Henry I. bestowed it on his friend and kinsman Richard de Redvers, Earl of Devon, the ruins of whose castle still overlook the Avon. Here his son Baldwin de Redvers in vain fortified himself against Stephen. Here, too, lived his grandson William de Vernon, who helped to bear the canopy at Richard’s second coronation at Winchester. Afterwards, the manor passed into the hands of Isabella de Fortibus, who, on her death-bed, sold it, with all her possessions, to Edward I., who well knew the value of such a stronghold. Though Edward II. bestowed the estate on Sir William Montacute, yet the castle still remained in the hands of the Crown.