The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

It affords a good illustration of how words grow in their meaning, and imperceptibly pass from one stage to another. It originally signified nothing but a shadow, and then the place where the shadow rests. In this second meaning it more particularly became associated with the idea of coolness, but gradually, whilst acquiring that idea, quite contrary to Milton’s “unpierced shade” (Paradise Lost, B. iv. 245), lost the notion of that coolness being caused by the interception of light and heat. In this sense it was transferred to any place which was cool, and so at last applied, as in the New Forest, to bare spots without a tree, deriving their coolness either from the breeze or the water.

Another instance of the gradual change in the meaning of words amongst provincialisms may be found in “scale,” or “squoyle.” In the New Forest it properly signifies a short stick loaded at one end with lead, answering to the “libbet” of Sussex, and is distinguished from a “snog,” which is only weighted with wood. With it also is employed the verb “to squoyle,” better known in reference to the old sport of “cock-squoyling.” From throwing at the squirrel the word was used in reference to persons, so that “Don’t squoyle at me” at length meant, “Do not slander me.” Lastly, the phrase, now still common, “Don’t throw squoyles at me,” comes by that forced interpretation of obtaining a sense, which nearly always reverses the original meaning, to signify, “Do not throw glances at me.” And so in the New Forest at this day “squoyles” not unfrequently mean glances.

There is, too, the word “hat,” which in the Forest takes the place of “clump,” and is nearly equivalent to the Sussex expression, “a toll of trees.” I have no doubt whatever that the word had its origin in the high-crowned hats of the Puritans, the “long crown” of the proverb; and in the first place referred only to tall isolated clumps of trees. Now, however, it does not merely mean a clump or ring, as the “seven firs” between Burley and Ringwood, and Birchen, and Dark Hats, near Lyndhurst, but any small irregular mass of trees, as the Withy Bed Hat in the valley near Boldrewood.

Then of course, in connection with the Forest trees, many peculiar words occur. The flower of the oak is called “the trail,” and the oak-apple the “sheets axe,”—children carrying it on the twenty-ninth of May, and calling out the word in derision to those who are not so provided. The mast and acorns are collectively known as “the turn out,” or “ovest;”[222] whilst the badly-grown or stunted trees are called “bustle-headed,” equivalent to the “oak-barrens” of America.

Other words there are, too, all proclaiming the woody nature of the country. The tops of the oaks are termed, when lopped, the “flitterings,” corresponding to the “batlins” of Suffolk. The brush-wood is still occasionally Chaucer’s “rise,” or “rice,” connected with the German reis; and the beam tree, on account of its silvery leaves, the “white rice.”[223] Frith, too, still means copse-wood. The stem of the ivy is the “ivy-drum.” Stumps of trees are known as “stools,” and a “stooled stick” is used in opposition to “maiden timber,” which has never been touched with the axe; whilst the roots are called “mocks,” “mootes,” “motes,” and “mores.” But about these last, which are all used with nice shades of difference, we shall have, further on, something to say.

Nor must we forget the bees which are largely kept throughout the Forest, feeding on the heather, leading Fuller to remark that Hampshire produced the best and worst honey in England. The bee-season, as it is called, generally lasts, on account of the heath, a month longer than on the Wiltshire downs. A great quantity of the Old-English mead—medu—is still made, and it is sold at much the same value as with the Old-English, being three or four times the price of common beer, with which it is often drunk. The bees, in fact, still maintain an important place in the popular local bye-laws. Even in Domesday the woods round Eling are mentioned as yearly yielding twelve pounds’ weight of honey. As may therefore be expected, when we remember that the whole of England was once called the Honey Island, here, as elsewhere, plenty of provincialisms occur concerning the bees.[224]

The drones are here named “the big bees,” the former word being in some parts seldom used. The young are never said to swarm, but “to play,” the word taking its origin from their peculiar flight at the time: as Patmore writes,—

“Under the chestnuts new bees are swarming,

Falling and rising like magical smoke.”

The caps of straw which are placed over the “bee-pots,” to protect them from wet, are known as the “bee-hackles,” or “bee-hakes.” This is one of those expressive words which is now only found in this form, and that, in the Midland Counties, of “wheat hackling,” that is, covering the sheaves with others in a peculiar way, to shelter them from the rain. About the honeycombs, or, as they are more commonly called, “workings,” the following rhyme exists:—