MAP OF THE NEW FOREST.
[High-resolution Map]

APPENDICES.

I. [Glossary of Provincialisms.] II. [List of the Flowering Plants.] III. [List of the Birds.] IV. [List of the Lepidoptera.]

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX I.
A GLOSSARY OF SOME OF THE PROVINCIALISMS USED IN THE NEW FOREST.

I could easily have expanded the following glossary to three times its size, but my object is to give only some specimens of those words which have not yet found their way into, or have not been fully explained in Mr. Halliwell’s or Mr. Wright’s dictionaries of provincialisms. The following collection is, I believe, the first ever made of the New Forest, or even, with the exception of the scanty list in Warner,[292] of Hampshire provincialisms, which of course to a certain extent it represents,—more especially those of the western part of the county. A separate work, however, would be needed to give the whole collection, and the following examples must here suffice.

Of course I do not say that all these words are to be found only in the New Forest. Many of them will doubtless be elsewhere discovered, though they hitherto, as here, have escaped notice. The time, however, for assigning the limits of our various provincialisms and provincial dialects has not yet arrived.

The use of the personal pronoun “he,” as, throughout the West of England, applied to things alike animate and inanimate, and the substitution of “thee” for you, when the speaker is angry, or wishes to be emphatic, may be here noticed. In the Forest, too, as in parts of Berkshire, a woman when employed upon out-door work is sometimes spoken of in the masculine gender, as the Hungarians are falsely said to have done of their queen on a certain memorable occasion. The confusion of cases which has been noticed by philologists is here, as in other parts of England, rather the result of ignorance than a peculiar character of the dialect.

Adder’s-Fern. The common polypody (Polypodium vulgare), so called from its rows of bright spores. The hard-fern (Blechnum boreale) is known as the “snake-fern.”

Allow, To. To think, suppose, consider. This word exactly corresponds to the American “guess” (which, by the way, is no Americanism, but used by Wiclif in his Bible: see Luke, ch. vii. v. 43), and is employed as often and as indefinitely in the New Forest. If you ask a peasant how far it is to any place, his answer nearly invariably is, “I allow it to be so far.” “Suppose,” in Sussex, is used in much the same way.