The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

Turning back to the Registers, let me add from the Ibbesley Parish Register Book, as so few people have seen a specimen, an entry of an affidavit of burial in a woollen shroud, in compliance with the Act passed in 1679, for the encouragement of the woollen manufacture in England.[264] It thus runs, placed opposite to the entry of the person’s burial, and written in the same handwriting:—“Jan. 9^th, 1678/79, I rec^d a certificate from Mr. Roger Clavell, Justice of y^e peace at Brokenhurst, that Thomas King and Anthony King, sons of Anthony King, deceased, did make oath before him, the sayd Roger Clavell, that the aforesayd Antony King was buried according to the late Act of Parliament.”

And again, opposite to the entries of their deaths, we find—“November 11^th.—Certified by John Torbuck, Vicar of Ellingham, y^t Edward Baily and Nicholas Baily, of Ibsely, were buried in woollen only.”

Pope’s lines on Mrs. Oldfield need hardly here be quoted. To conclude, of the parish books in the district let me only say that at Fordingbridge may be found an inventory of all the church furniture for 1554; and at Ibbesley, lists of collections “towards the redemption of the poor slaves out of Turkey,” “for the poor French Protestants,” “for the redemption of captives,” and “for the distressed Protestants beyond the sea,”—all testifying to the social and moral condition of the people, without which it is impossible to give the history of any district or any country.

The Norman Font in Brockenhurst Church.

CHAPTER XX.
THE GEOLOGY.

The Barton Cliffs.

I have endeavoured, whenever there was an opportunity, to point out the natural history of the Forest, feeling sure that, from a lack of this knowledge, so many miss the real charms of the country. “One green field is like another green field,” cried Johnson. Nothing can be so untrue. No two fields are ever the same. A brook flowing through the one, a narrow strip of chalk intersecting the other, will make them as different as Perthshire from Essex. Even Socrates could say in the Phædrus, τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν μ’ ἐθέλει διδάσκειν. and this arose from the state, or rather absence, of all Natural Science at Athens. Had that been different he would have spoken otherwise.

The world is another place to the man who knows, and to the man who is ignorant of Natural History. To the one the earth is full of a thousand significations, to the other meaningless.