Ruined Villages in the New Forest.
| “The fire from off the hearth hath fled, The smoke in air has vanished. The last, long, lingering look is given; The stifled sigh, and the parting groan, And the sufferers on their way are gone.” |
The memorial-tree, from which the arrow of Sir Walter Tyrrel glanced, and beside which the king lay extended on the ground, is now exceeding old, and scarcely a trace remains of its former greatness. It stood in this wild spot, when the stern decree went forth, which enjoined that throughout the whole extent of the south-western part of Hampshire, measuring thirty miles from Salisbury to the sea, and in circumference at least ninety miles, all trace of human habitation should be swept away. William might have indulged his passion for the chase in the many parks and forests which Anglo-Saxon monarchs had reserved for the purpose, but he preferred rather to have a vast hunting-ground for his “superfluous and insatiate pleasure” in the immediate neighbourhood of Winchester, his favourite place of residence. The wide expanse that was thus doomed to inevitable desolation was called Ytene or Ytchtene; it comprised numerous villages and homesteads, churches, and ancestral halls, where Saxon families of rank resided, and where an industrious population followed the daily routine of pasturage and husbandry.[34] A large proportion had been consequently brought into cultivation; yet sufficient still remained to afford a harbour for numerous wild animals. This part comprised many sylvan spots of great beauty, with tracts of common land, covered with the golden blossomed gorse, and tufts of ferns, or else with short herbage, intermingled with wild thyme. Noble groups of forest-trees were seen at intervals, with clear running streams, and masses of huge stones which projected from among the grass. The sun rose on the morning of the fatal day in cloudless beauty, and fresh breezes tempered the heat, which, at harvest-time is often great; the people were already in the fields, and the creaking of heavy-laden waggons was heard at intervals, with the sweeping sound of the rapid sickle. In a moment the scene was changed. Bands of Norman soldiers rushed in and drove all before them. They trod down the standing corn, and commanded the terrified inhabitants of hall and hut, to depart in haste. More than one hundred manors, villages, and hamlets were depopulated, even the churches were thrown down—those venerated places, where the voice of prayer and thanksgiving had been heard for generations; where the young bride pledged her vows, and where words of peace were spoken to cheer the hearts of those who laid their friends to rest beside the walls. He who passed the next day over the wide waste, saw only ruins black with smoke, trampled fields, and dismantled churches. Here and there broken implements of husbandry met the view, and beside them, not unfrequently, the corpse of him who had dared to resist the harsh mandate of the Conqueror. Females, too, had fallen to the earth in their terror and distress, and young children were in their death-sleep, among the tufts of flowers where they had sported the day before. Many stately buildings were pulled down at once; others, having their roofs thrown open, were left to be destroyed by the weather, and hence it not seldom happened that a stranger, in passing through a meadow into one of those shady coverts, which still varied the aspect of the country, forgetting, in the freshness and the loveliness of all around him, the terrible undoings of previous days, might see through the undulating branches of the trees, the walls or roofs of houses, which looked as if they had escaped the general ruin. They stood, apparently, in the midst of cultivated fields, occasionally by the road side, and their pointed roofs were covered with the vine or honeysuckle. On a nearer approach the illusion vanished, not a sound disturbed the silence of the place; the houses which looked so inviting when seen at a short distance, showed that the hand of ruin had done its work. The doors were broken open, the windows dashed in, the roofs were open to the winds of heaven, and the little gardens overrun with weeds. Large rents appeared in the walls, which were generally made of wood, neatly plastered, and he who looked through the breaches saw that tufts of rank grass, had grown up in the spaces between the stones, with which the floors were occasionally paved. The ruins of an antique abbey were often close at hand, with its richly painted windows, broken through and through; or, perhaps, the shattered walls of some hospitable dwelling, in which a Saxon thane had resided. The open space before the house, where, in summer weather, the family used to assemble, where the harp was heard, and the young people amused themselves with sports of various kinds, was overrun with weeds. There was no print of footsteps on the grass, no trace that the place had recently been inhabited; those who once lived there had found another home; perhaps the low and silent one which alone remains for the houseless and the miserable.
It was said of the proud Norman, that he loved wild beasts as if he had been their father. He enacted laws for their preservation, which tended to render him extremely unpopular, and while the slaying of a man might be atoned for by a moderate compensation, it was decreed, that whoever should kill a stag or deer, a wild boar, or even a hare, should be punished with total blindness.[35] Even the Norman chiefs, who were in general great lovers of the chase, were prohibited from keeping sporting dogs on their own estates unless they subjected the poor animals to such a mutilation of their fore-paws as rendered them unfit for hunting. This enactment pressed hard upon the Norman and English barons, for many of them depended chiefly for subsistence on their bows and nets.
Where the labour of man has ceased, vegetation soon asserts her empire, and fields, when left to themselves, become, according to their soil, either wild or stony, or else covered with a dense growth of underwood, and tall trees. Such was the case over the wide expanse which had been rendered desolate; the spaces of common ground, with golden blossomed gorse and wild thyme, continued such as they had been, but trees grew thick and fast, the beautiful groves became woods in the course of a short time, and the once cultivated country was rapidly absorbed in the wilderness portions of Ytchtene. A vast forest darkened the land, and all trace of ruined homes and dismantled churches disappeared in many parts, while in others, either the line of erections might be traced by the elevation of the soil, or else large blocks of stone, and here and there a broken arch, or doorway, long pointed out the site of a church or castle. Names, too, are even now retained, with the recollection of their own sad histories. Church-place and Church-moore seems to mark the solitary spots as the sites of ancient buildings, where the Anglo-Saxons worshipped and dwelt in peace, before the stern decree of the unrelenting conqueror razed the sacred edifices. Thompson’s Castle recalls to mind, the cheerfulness and hospitality that presided in an ancestral hall, while the termination of ham and ton, annexed to many of the woodlands, may be taken as an evidence that where innumerable boughs are waving, a thronging population once inhabited.