[Illustration: The New Forest from Bramble Hill (Sunrise)]
THE NEW FOREST:
ITS
_History and its Scenery._
BY
JOHN R. WISE.
[Illustration: Old Oak in Boldrewood]
With 63 Illustrations drawn by Walter Crane, engraved by W. J. Linton,
And Two Maps.
LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., 65, CORNHILL.
M.DCCC.LXVII.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
Preface vii
I. Introductory 1
II. Its Scenery 7
III. Its Early History 20
IV. Its Later History 39
V. Calshot Castle and the Old South-Eastern Sea-Coast 49
VI. Beaulieu Abbey 60
VII. The South-Western Part.—Brockenhurst, Boldre, Sway,
Hinchelsea, and Burley 74
VIII. The Central Part.—Lyndhurst 85
IX. Minestead and Rufus’s Stone 91
X. The Northern Part.—Stoney Cross, Bramble Hill, Fritham,
Bentley, Eyeworth, Studley, and Sloden 109
XI. The Valley of the Avon.—Fordingbridge, Charford, Breamore,
Ibbesley, Ellingham, and Ringwood 116
XII. The Valley of the Avon (_continued_).—Tyrrel’s Ford, Sopley,
and Winkton 125
XIII. Christchurch 129
XIV. The Old South-Western Seaboard.—Somerford, Chewton Glen,
Hurst Castle, and Lymington 145
XV. The Gipsy and the West-Saxon 158
XVI. The Folk-Lore and Provincialisms 172
XVII. The Barrows 196
XVIII. The Roman and Romano-British Potteries 214
XIX. The Parish Registers and Churchwardens’ Books 226
XX. The Geology 234
XXI. The Botany 250
XXII. The Ornithology 258
APPENDICES.
I. Glossary of Provincialisms 279
II. List of the Flowering Plants 289
III. List of the Birds 307
IV. List of the Lepidoptera 319
Postscript 328
Index 329
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
The New Forest from Bramble Hill (Sunrise), _Frontispiece_.
Old Oak in Boldrewood, _Title-page_.
PAGE
View in Bushey Bratley 1
The Entrance from Barrow’s Moor to Mark Ash 6
The Stream in the Queen’s Bower Wood 7
The Charcoal Burner’s Path 19
The Cattle Ford 20
View in Gibb’s Hill Wood 38
The Millaford Brook 39
The Woodcutter’s Track 48
Calshot Castle 49
Norman Doorway at Fawley Church 59
Arches of the Chapter House 60
Pulpit of the Refectory 68
Old Barn or “Spicarium” of Beaulieu Abbey 70
Chapel at St. Leonard’s Grange 70
Canopied Niche in St. Leonard’s Chapel 73
View in Frame Wood 74
View in the Queen’s Bower Wood 84
View in the Great Huntley Woods 85
The Woodman’s Path 90
Oaks in Boldrewood 91
Rufus’s Stone 96
View from Castle Malwood 108
View in Studley Wood 109
View in Puckpits Wood 112
Yews and Whitebeams in Sloden 115
The Avon from Castle Hill 116
The Avon at Ibbesley 124
Tyrrel’s Ford 125
The Avon at Winkton 128
The Priory Church, Christchurch 129
The Norman House, Christchurch 133
The North Porch and Doorway of the Priory Church 144
Chewton Glen 145
Hurst Castle 157
View in Mark Ash Wood 158
The King’s Gairn Brook 171
Anderwood Corner 172
Bushey Bratley (another view) 195
The Urns in Bratley Barrow 196
Keltic Urn, Neck of Roman Wine-Vessel, and Flint Knives 206
Barrows on Beaulieu Plain 213
Wine-Flask, Drinking-Cups, and Bowls 214
Necks of Oil-Flasks 218
Necks of Wine-Vessels and Oil-Flask 218
Patterns from Fragments 223
Patterns from Fragments 223
Oil-Flask, Drinking-Cups, Bowl, and Jar 225
Boldre Church 226
Norman Font in Brockenhurst Church 233
The Barton Cliffs 234
Fossils from the Shepherd’s Gutter Beds 244
Fossils from the Brook Beds 249
Barrows Moor Wood 250
The King’s Gairn Brook (another view) 257
The Heronry at Vinney Ridge 258
Nests of the Honey and Common Buzzard 266
View in Buckhill Wood 276
The Staple Cross 288
Gladiolus Illyricus 306
The Kildeer Plover 318
The Cicada 328
Map of the Old South-Western Sea-Coast _to face page_ 149
Plan of Sloden Hole ” 216
Section of Hordle Cliff ” 238
Section of Beckton Cliff ” 241
Map of the New Forest ” 276
PREFACE.
Under the title of the New Forest I have thought it best to include the
whole district lying between the Southampton Water and the Avon, which,
in the beginning of Edward I.’s reign, formed its boundaries. To have
restricted myself to its present limits would have deprived the reader
of all the scenery along the coast, and that contrast which a Forest
requires to bring out all its beauties.
The maps are drawn from those of the Ordnance Survey, reduced to the
scale of half an inch to the mile, with the additions of the names of
the woods taken from the Government Map of the Forest, and my own notes.
The illustrations have been made upon the principle that they shall
represent the scene as it looked at the time it was taken. Nothing has
since been added, nothing left out. The views appear as they were on the
day they were drawn. Two exceptions occur. The ugly modern windows of
Calshot Castle, and the clock-face on the tower of the Priory Church of
Christchurch, have been omitted.
Further, the views have been chosen rather to show the less-known
beauties of the Forest than the more-known scenes. For this reason the
avenue between Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst—the village of Minestead,
nestling half amongst the Forest oaks and half in its own orchards—the
view from Stoney Cross, stretching over wood and vale to the Wiltshire
downs, have been omitted. Every one who comes to the Forest must see
these, and every one with the least love for Nature must feel their
beauty.
In their places are given the quiet scenes in the heart of the great
woods, where few people have the leisure, and some not the strength to
go—quiet brooks flowing down deep valleys, and woodland paths trod only
by the cattle and the Forest workmen.
For the same reason, sunrise, and not sunset, has been chosen for the
frontispiece.
To the kind help of friends I am indebted for much special aid and
information—to the deputy surveyor, L. H. Cumberbatch, Esq., for
permission to open various barrows and banks, for the use of the
Government maps, as also for the Forest statistics—to the Rev. H. M.
Wilkinson, and T. B. Rake, Esq., for great assistance in the botany and
ornithology of the district; as also to Mr. Baker, of Brockenhurst, for
the list of the Forest Lepidoptera.
_London, November, 1862._
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
Some slight alterations have been made in Chapter III. in the arguments
from _Domesday_, which, as also those upon the former condition of the
district, have been strengthened.
In all other respects, with the exception of some few additions and
corrections, the text is unaltered.
_London, February, 1863._
THE NEW FOREST:
ITS
_History and its Scenery._
“Game of hondes he loued y nou, and of w**error(yuml)lde best,
And h**error(yuml)s forest and h**error(yuml)s wodes, and mest þe
n**error(yuml)we forest.”
_Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle_
(concerning William the Conqueror)
Ed: Hearne, vol. ii. p. 375.
THE NEW FOREST.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
[Illustration: View in Bushey Bratley.]
No person, I suppose, would now give any attention to, much less approve
of, Lord Burleigh’s advice to his son—“Not to pass the Alps.” We have,
on the contrary, in these days gone into an opposite extreme. We race
off to explore the Rhine before we know the Thames. We have Alpine
clubs, and Norway fishing, and Iceland exploring societies, but most of
us are beyond measure ignorant of our own hills and valleys. Every inch
of Mont Blanc has been traversed by Englishmen, but who dreams of
exploring the Cotswolds; or how many can tell in what county are the
Seven Springs, and their purple anemones? We rush to and fro, looking at
everything, and remembering nothing. We see places only that we may be
seen there, or else be known to have seen them.
Yet to Englishmen, surely the scenes of their own land should possess a
greater interest than any other. Go where we will throughout England,
there is no spot which is not bound up with our history. Nameless
barrows, ruined castles, battlefields now reaped by the sickle instead
of the sword, all proclaim the changes our country has undergone. Each
invasion which we have suffered, each revolution through which we have
passed, are written down for us in unmistakeable characters. The phases
of our Religion, the rise or fall of our Art, are alike told us by the
grey mouldings and arches of the humblest parish Church as by our Abbeys
and Cathedrals. The faces, too, and gait, and dialect, and accent, of
our peasantry declare to us our common ancestry from Kelt, and
Old-English, and Norseman. A whole history lies hid in the name of some
obscure village.
I am not, for one moment, decrying travelling elsewhere. All I say is,
that those who do not know their own country, can know nothing rightly
of any other. To understand the scenery of our neighbours, we must first
see something of the beauties of our own; so that when we are abroad, we
may be able to make some comparisons,—to carry with us, when we look
upon the valleys of the Seine and the Rhine, some impression of our own
landscapes and our own rivers—some recollection of our own cathedrals,
when we stand by those of Milan and Rouen.
The New Forest is, perhaps, as good an example as could be wished of
what has been said of English scenery, and its connection with our
history. It remains after some eight hundred years still the New Forest.
True, its boundaries are smaller, but the main features are the same as
on the day when first afforested by the Conqueror. The names of its
woods and streams and plains are the same. It is almost the last, too,
of the old forests with which England was formerly so densely clothed.
Charnwood is now without its trees: Wychwood is enclosed: the great
Forest of Arden—Shakspeare’s Arden—is no more, and Sherwood is only
known by the fame of Robin Hood. But the New Forest still stands full of
old associations with, and memories of, the past. To the historian it
tells of the Forest Laws, and the death of one of the worst, and the
weakness of the most foolish, of English kings. To the ecclesiologist it
can show, close to it, the Priory Church of Christchurch, with all its
glories of Norman architecture, built by the Red King’s evil counsellor,
Flambard; and just outside, too, its boundaries, the Conventual Church
of Romsey, with its lovely Romanesque triforium, in whose nunnery Edith,
beloved by the English, their “good Maud,” “beatissima regina,” as the
Chroniclers love to call her, was educated.
At its feet lies Southampton, with its Late Norman arcaded town-wall,
and gates, and God’s House, with memories of Sir Bevis and his wife
Josyan the Brighte, and his horse Arundel—the port for the Roman
triremes, and afterwards for the galleys of Venice and Bayonne—where our
own Henry V. built
“the grete dromons,
The Trinité, the Grace-Dieu.”[1]
Within it, once in the very heart, stand the Abbot’s house and the
cloister walls of Beaulieu, the one abbey, with the exception of
Hales-Owen, in Shropshire, founded by John. It can point, too, to the
Roman camp at Buckland Rings, to the ruins of the Norman castle at
Christchurch, to Henry VIII.’s forts at Hurst and Calshot, built with
the stones of the ruined monastery of Beaulieu; can show, too, bosomed
amongst its trees, quiet village churches, most of them Norman and Early
English, old manor-houses, as at Ellingham, famous in story, grey
roadside crosses, sites of Roman potteries, and Keltic and West-Saxon
battlefields and barrows scattered over its plains.
For the ornithologist its woods, and rivers, and seaboard attract more
birds than most counties. For the geologist the Middle-Eocene beds are
always open in the Hordle and Barton Cliffs inlaid with shell and bone.
For the botanist and entomologist, its marshes, moors, and woodlands,
possess equal treasures.
But in its wild scenery lies its greatest charm. From every hill-top
gleam the blue waters of the English Channel, broken in the foreground
by the long line of the Isle of Wight downs and the white chalk walls of
the Needles. Nowhere, in extent at least, spread such stretches of heath
and moor, golden in the spring with the blaze of furze, and in the
autumn purple with heather, and bronzed with the fading fern. Nowhere in
England rise such oak-woods, their boughs rimed with the frostwork of
lichens, and dark beech-groves with their floor of red brown leaves, on
which the branches weave their own warp and woof of light and shade.
Especially to its scenery I would call attention. This, above all, I
wish to impress on the reader, seeing that beauty is one of the chief
ends and aims of nature: and that the ground beneath our feet is decked
with flowers, and the sky above our heads is painted, with a thousand
colours, to cheer man as he goes to his work in the morning, and to fill
his heart with thankfulness as he returns at evening.
Now, neither are scarcely ever seen. The flowers cannot grow in our
stony streets: the glory of the morning and evening is blotted out by
the fog of smoke which broods over our cities.
As the population grows, our commons and waste lands disappear. Our
large towns have swollen into provinces. Fashion sways the rich.
Necessity compels the poor to live in them. As our wealth increases, our
love for nature contracts. One, therefore, of the chief objects of this
book is to show how much quiet beauty and how much interest lie beside
our doors—to, point out to the reader who may be jaded by the toils of
Fashion or Labour where in England there are still some thirty miles of
moorland and woodland left uncultivated, over which he can wander as he
pleases.
And here, if this book should induce any readers to visit the Forest,
let me earnestly advise them to do so, as far as possible, on foot. I
see but this main difference between rich and poor—that the poor work to
get money, the rich spend money to get work. And I know no better way
for Englishmen to use their superfluous energies than in learning their
own country by walking over its best scenes.
I will only ask any one to make the experiment between walking and
driving over the same ground; and see how much he will learn by the one,
how much lose by the other method. In the one case, he simply hurries or
stops, at the discretion of some ignorant driver, who regards him of
less importance than his horses; in the other, he can pause to sketch
many a scene before invisible, can at his leisure search each heath or
quarry for flowers or fossils, can turn aside across the field-paths to
any village church, or wander through any wood which may invite him to
its solitude, and, above all, know the pleasure of being tired, and the
sweetness of rest in the noontide shade.
[Illustration: The Entrance from Barrow’s Moor to Mark Ash.]