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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PLJTES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 View over the Forest from near Malwood. Etched bv Alexander 
 
 Ansted Frontispiece 
 
 A Forest Heath, near Lyndhurst. Etched by John Fullwood to face 22 
 
 The Rufus Glade. By Lancelot Speed ,, ,, 54 
 
 Herding Swine in the New Forest. By Lancelot Speed „ ,, 76 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT 
 
 In the Forest near Lvndhurst 
 
 9 
 
 The Queen's House, Lyndhurst 11 
 
 Cottage at Lyndhurst i? 
 
 A Dead Giant, Mark Ash 15 
 
 Charcoal Burner's Hut, Bolderwood 10 
 
 Matley Passage and Matley Bog 25 
 
 Knightwood Oak, Mark Ash 29 
 
 The Heronry at Vinney Ridge 31 
 
 The Adder-Catcher ■j-j 
 
 Brockenhurst Church ^r 
 
 Bridge near Brockenhurst 36 
 
 The Forest Ponies 
 
 45 
 
 218395 
 
4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Beaulieu Abbey 59 
 
 Gate House, Beaulieu 62 
 
 Beaulieu 63 
 
 Interior of Beaulieu Church 65 
 
 The Edge of the Forest, near Lymington 67 
 
 The Harbour, Lymington 69 
 
 A Creek on the Beaulieu River 70 
 
 Beaulieu River at Buckler's Hard 72 
 
 Highcliffe 77 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE CENTRAL FOREST AND ITS CAPITAL 
 
 The wholly foreign character of its creation — Its vast extent — The alleged cruelty in its 
 aff'oresting — Modern views — The nature of forest laws — The forest preserved by 
 their survival — Lynd hurst the centre and capital of the Forest — The Verderers'' Hall 
 and Court — The pilgrimage to Mark Ash — Swan Green — The wild and open forest — 
 The Lymington stream — The hush of the forest — The progressive splendour of the trees — 
 The wealth of ornatnent in the old woods — The charcoal-burner^ s hut — Voices of the 
 forest — Alone in the sanctuary. 
 
 The historical link which the New Forest has with the associations 
 in every English mind is fixed to the era of the Normans. It was the 
 foreign Norman and Angevin Kings of England who made and used the 
 forest. It lay in the same county, and within a ride of their palace 
 and capital at Winchester; and they took their sport from Mai wood on 
 their way to Rouen, riding down after a few days' deer-shooting to 
 Beaulieu or Lymington, where the galleys waited to take them across the 
 Channel, much as the royal yachts wait to take Her Majesty Queen 
 Victoria across the Solent to Osborne. 
 
 But the subsequent part played by the forest as a hunting ground 
 for kings, and a district exempt from the general law of the land, and 
 at the absolute disposal of the sovereign, is entirely eclipsed by the 
 picturesque and dramatic incidents which tradition has assigned to its 
 violent creation by the first Norman monarch, and its requital, not only 
 by the violent death of the second, but by those of two other children 
 
6 THE NEW FORESr 
 
 of the Conqueror in this fatal precinct. His son, Richard, who was 
 supposed to be in his disposition the special image of his father, when not 
 yet of an age to be girded with the belt of knighthood, was the first victim. 
 He is said to have been fatally injured by the branch of a tree when 
 riding after a stag; and there is a record in Domesday Book of lands 
 restored by his father to their rightful owner as an offering for Richard's 
 soul.^ The second son of the Conqueror who died in the forest was 
 another Richard, an illegitimate child, whose death seems to have been 
 forgotten in the greater catastrophes of the death of the elder Richard 
 and of Rufus, which preceded and followed it. 
 
 Whatever belief is to be given to the tale of cruelty in its 
 afforesting, the size and character of the district, which the Conqueror 
 devoted to his use as a " single and mighty Nimrod," by the simple act of 
 putting it under forest law, is a measure of the scope of that imperial 
 mind. The area was as large as that of the Isle of Wight. It was 
 bounded on the north by the line from the river Avon to the river Ouse, 
 separating Hampshire from Wiltshire ; by the river Avon on the west, 
 down to Christchurch. By the sea from Christchurch to Calshot Castle ; 
 by the Southampton Water, and by the river Ouse. Within these 
 boundaries are about 224 square miles, containing 143,360 acres of land, 
 of which even now 90,000 acres are still within the boundary of the 
 forest. Its natural features were such as to make it a hunter's paradise. 
 From the swirling salmon river at Christchurch, to the wide lagoon of 
 Southampton Water, it exhibited and still contains, almost every natural 
 feature which made the forests, " reguni -penetralia et eorum maxima 
 delicia,'" "the chief delight of kings, and their secret and secure retreat." 
 Fronted by the sheltered waters of an inland sea, and pierced by the four 
 wide, beautiful, and commodious estuaries of Christchurch, Lymington, 
 Beaulieu, and Southampton Water, its heaths, pools, wastes, thickets and 
 bogs, studded and interlaced with good ground, producing deep and 
 ancients woods, made it a natural and unrivalled sanctuary for game. 
 
 The charge against the Conqueror of " wasting " this district appears 
 
 in its most violent form in the pages of Lingard. " Though the king 
 
 possessed sixty-eight forests, besides parks and chases, in different parts 
 
 of England, he was not satisfied, but for the occasional accommodation of 
 
 ^ Freeman, Norman Conquest^ Vol. iv. p. 609. 
 
rHE NEW FOREST 7 
 
 his court, afforested an extensive tract of country lying between Winchester 
 and the sea-coast. The inhabitants were expelled ; the cottages and 
 churches were burnt ; and more than thirty square miles of a rich and 
 populous district were withdrawn from cultivation and converted into a 
 wilderness, to afford sufficient range for the deer, and ample space for 
 the royal diversion." "Many populous towns and villages and thirty-six 
 parish churches," is the more circumstantial estimate of others, Voltaire 
 first questioned this tradition on grounds of general historical criticism. 
 Cobbett easily detected its improbability, from a mere examination of 
 the soil of the forest. It could never have been a " rich and populous 
 district " simply because, for the greater part, the soil is among the 
 poorest in the south of England. Thirty thousand acres were in 1849 
 reported unfit either for agriculture, the growth of trees, or pasturage. 
 The test of figures also throws a doubt on the destruction of the villages. 
 In the original area of the fiDrest there still remain eleven parish 
 churches on sites where churches were in existence before the time of the 
 Conqueror. " If he destroyed thirty-six parish churches, what a popu- 
 lous country this must have been ! " writes Cobbett. " There must have 
 been forty-seven parish churches ; so that there was over this whole 
 district, one parish church to every four-and-three-quarter square miles." 
 
 The modern inference from these criticisms goes to the extreme 
 of considering, that in making the forest, William confined himself 
 to enforcing the forest law within its boundaries, thereby reserving 
 the exclusive right of sporting for himself, while " men retained 
 possession of their lands, their woods, mills, or other property, just as 
 before, save for the stringent regulations of the forest law." ^ 
 
 Even so the interference with liberty and property, due to this 
 extraordinary Norman provision for the amusement of the monarch is 
 almost incredible to modern ideas. 
 
 " Forest law " made of the area to which it might at any moment be 
 applied, a kind of " proclaimed district," where the law of the land at 
 once ceased to run, and the rights of property only existed under con- 
 ditions which were mainly^ but not entirely, directed to the preservation 
 of game. Its excuse was that it was a convenient method of placing wild 
 
 1 Arboriculture of the New Forest, by the Hon. G. Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor, New- 
 Forest. 
 
8 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 districts, infested by outlaws, under the strong government of the king, 
 in place of the timid " presentments " of frightened villagers, and that it 
 formed a reserve of men and munitions of war for the sovereign. The 
 assize of the forest of 1184 by Henry II. gives a good notion of the 
 working of these laws in the New Forest, and a clue to the survivals 
 which are still there found. No one might sell or give anything from 
 his own wood, if within the forest, which would destroy it : only fire- 
 wood {estoverid) was to be taken. The result was that no large timber 
 could be felled, and this therefore ceased to be private property within 
 the Crown forests. The king's foresters were to be answerable if this 
 wood was destroyed. No one was to agist (turn out) his cattle before the 
 king " agisted " his. The king could agist his fifteen days before 
 Michaelmas, and closed the woods fifteen days after Michaelmas. No 
 spring grazing was allowed, so saplings and seedlings had a chance to 
 grow. Open spaces were to be cut where deer could be shot at, like 
 the " rides " in our pheasant covers. No tanner or bleacher of skins was 
 to live in a forest, and " no receivers or thieves." 
 
 But the rigour of forest law was mitigated in the days of Henry III., 
 the whole of whose charter of the forests is framed against the an- 
 noyance which the inhabitants had felt from the severity of the 
 former laws. It provided that every free man should be allowed to 
 " agist " his own wood in a forest when he pleased, and to have his own 
 eyries of hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons, eagles and herons. It granted 
 permission to drive pigs and cattle through the forest, and let them 
 spend a night on the king's land, with other privileges, which were 
 probably the origin of many " forest rights " now claimed in the 
 district. Are we then to conclude that the hardships suffered by the 
 inhabitants of the " Ytene," the Saxon name of the New Forest, were 
 limited to such as were incidental to the enforcement of forest laws '^. 
 Such a consoling answer can scarcely be given. In spite of the inaccuracies 
 of the form in which it has come down to us, the tradition of the 
 wasting of this particular forest and the confiscation of land^ are too 
 unanimous to be disregarded. 
 
 ^ Freeman quotes an instance of confiscation from Domesday. "The sons of Godric 
 Ralf hold under the King at Minstrad. Their father had three hides and a half of 
 land. Now his sons have only half a hide. The rest of the ground is in the forest." 
 
lo THE NEW FOREST 
 
 The " stiffness " and cruelty of such a course are too much in 
 keeping with the character of the king, who turned into a desert 
 the whole district between the Humber and the Tees. The forest 
 was perfectly suited by site and soil for William's purpose, and it 
 is difficult to doubt that in its afforestation hardships were inflicted, 
 which were remembered long after the general hatred of the Normans 
 had died away. 
 
 But it must not be forgotten that though the rigours of the forest 
 laws as a means of preserving game relaxed, the protection given by 
 them to the woods was never withdrawn, and it is to them that we 
 owe the preservation of the ancient timber until the present day. 
 When laxly administered, as in the days of Charles I. and the Common- 
 wealth, the woods have been invariably destroyed ; when enforced, as 
 by James I. and later in the days of William III. the trees have increased, 
 and descended to us as one of the finest national inheritances. The 
 present management of the forest, under an act passed in 1877, is 
 based on the principle that all, except some 20,000 acres, inclosed since 
 the year 1700, shall remain open and wild. But in this wild area 
 forest law still runs, and protects the timber from waste and robbery. 
 
 In the Verderers' Hall at Lyndhurst the survivals of forest 
 law and forest customs appear by the dumb witness of fixed engines 
 of justice as primitive as the oaks of Brockenhurst. One end 
 of the bare old chamber is fitted up as a court, in which offenders 
 against the custom of the forest, wood and fern stealers, or those 
 who have transgressed the limits within which cattle may be kept, 
 or other liberties of the forest, are presented by the " agisters," who 
 play the part of the knights from the hundreds, and townsmen from 
 the township, who " presented " criminals in the shire moots. " Pre- 
 sented," the offender certainly is ; for he is exposed to the public 
 view in the most primitive dock existing in England. The prisoner 
 sits on a kind of perch, to which he climbs by a step. Behind this 
 is a square back with cross-pieces of black oak, with the rough axe 
 marks still showing, and immediately in front, beyond the narrow 
 interval of the clerk's table is the full bench of verderers. Assuming, 
 as is probable, that this is a copy of the most ancient arrangement of 
 such courts, we can imagine how some trembling wretch, with the 
 
12 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 prospect of maiming or blinding before him, must have felt before 
 the scowl of the forest rangers of Norman or Angevin kings, on 
 this seat of justice over against him. Besides the rude accommodation 
 for judges and prisoners, the court contains a recess filled with books 
 on forest law which, by that grace of congruity which seems inseparable 
 from everything in this strangely perfect region, are screened by the 
 most appropriate curtain that could be devised, the skin of a red deer. 
 The walls are decorated by horns of deer, red and fallow. Whatever 
 the history of the great stirrup, which hangs upon the wall, and is said 
 to have belonged to William Rufus, it is a notable relic, and thoroughly 
 in place in this hall of woodland justice. It is clearly the stirrup in 
 which the thickly-mailed feet of the days of plate armour, with their 
 broad iron toes were thrust, thick enough and broad enough to give 
 "support" for the most ponderous horseman in his coat of steel; 
 and so wide, that the legend that all dogs which could not be 
 passed through it were considered possible enemies to game, and 
 therefore maimed does not seem improbable, except in regard to dates. 
 
 Lyndhurst is by size and position the true capital of the forest. 
 There stands the ancient Queen's House, to which the Verderers' Hall 
 is attached, and in which the Deputy-Surveyor of the Forest has his 
 residence, and on the high mound of natural verdure in the centre of 
 the town, the soaring spire of its church shoots up, and dominates the 
 immense tract of woodland, of which it forms the natural centre. 
 
 The town has no mean outskirts, or squalid surroundings. The 
 woodlands run up to its old houses like a sea ; and the parks surrounding 
 the fine mansions, which fringe the forest capital, are mere incidents in its 
 scenery, lost and absorbed in the wild woods around them. Cuf?"nalls 
 Park, a grassy hill clothed with oaks and beeches, lies just outside the 
 town, and leads the eye by an easy transition, from the formal gardens of 
 the Lyndhurst houses, to the uncovenanted graces of the natural forest. 
 Beyond the park the road divides to Burley and Christchurch on the 
 left, to Ringwood on the right, and at the parting of the ways, 
 the forest at once and without reserve flings itself across the field 
 of sight. Thence to Mark Ash, the most renowned of all the ancient 
 woods, the way lies through scenes in an ascending scale of beauty which 
 mark this as the first path to be trodden by the pilgrim and stranger. 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 13 
 
 The understanding needs time to eddy round the crowding forms that 
 claim its homage. It is the Eleusinian Way, along which the genius of the 
 forest seems to lead the neophyte gently by the hand, saying, " Look on 
 this, and that, and that, first grasp the lesser, then the greater mysteries, 
 until with eyes and understanding opened you may enter and enjoy the 
 earthly paradise of perfect beauty which lies beyond." 
 
 Thus the mind keeps its sense of proportion, and the excitement and 
 
 
 Cottage at L'^ndhurst. 
 
 Stimulus of this appeal to the sense of admiration is maintained, as the 
 appetite grows with the beauty which feeds it. Slow and lingering should 
 be the tread, silent and solitary the traveller, in a first journey 
 to the high places of the forest, assured that, though the first steps are 
 through the scenes of laughing rustic prettiness, by lawns and groves, 
 the playgrounds of the forest children, and pastures of the forest cattle, 
 ground that in other times would have been sacred to Faunus and Pan, 
 and all their merry crew, he will at last pass beyond the ways of men, 
 and find himself face to face with masterpieces of Nature's hand, before 
 which he must stand silent and amazed. 
 
14 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 From CufFnalls Park two winding roads lead up the steep ascent 
 on either hand. In the space between, sloping gently upwards towards 
 the light is neither field nor fence, but against the sky-line is ranged 
 a crescent of oaks and beeches, fronted by most ancient thorns. 
 Three shapes, three colours distinguish tree from tree, through their 
 centre a green glade winds up into the wood, and from their feet 
 a smooth lawn of turf flows gently down into the point at which 
 the roads divide, watched on either hand by a sentinel oak. 
 
 " Swan Green " is the name of this beautiful lawn. Beyond its 
 slope lies the village of Emery Down, after which the signs and 
 sounds of human habitation disappear with a suddenness almost startling. 
 The road lies through rolling tracts of the most wild and ancient forest 
 land. Right and left the slopes are clothed with trees in the prime and 
 vigour of their age. Some few are oaks ; but the beech is the indigen- 
 ous, or perhaps the growing tree of this stately tract of forest, and from 
 this point onwards the mind is incessantly invited to consider the manifold 
 beauties of form which even one species of forest tree presents. 
 
 There seems no limit to the hall of columns which fades away into 
 dim distance in the wood, though the space between the stem is clear 
 and open. The gray trunks shoot straight upwards to the sky each with 
 its smooth surrounding lawn. The tallest beeches which spring on the 
 slope of the hill-sides seem to draw back with a certain reticence from 
 the broad pathways of the glades, drooping their branches downward and 
 wrapping them round their feet with a dainty and almost feminine dignity 
 and reserve. Others grow like oaks, flinging their branches abroad in 
 wild disordered tangles. 
 
 There are those among them which have already passed their prime, 
 and yet scarcely show the symptoms of decay. In many beeches the 
 first years of decline add dignity to their forms. The tree dies from the 
 top ; but at first this appears only by a cessation of upward growth. 
 The branches at the summit thicken, cluster, and multiply, like the 
 antlers on an old stag's horns, giving to the whole massive and weighty 
 proportions in strange contrast to the usual graceful and feathery outlines 
 of its race. In others, further advanced in the stages of decay, the 
 vigour of the lower branches so arrests the eye, that it scarcely travels 
 beyond the mass of leafage, though above and from the centre of the 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 15 
 
 healthy boughs an upright growth of bare gray limbs rises grimly naked 
 and alone. 
 
 Some two miles from Lyndhurst the hush of the forest begins. If 
 the wind is still, and the trees motionless, there is a silence which can be 
 felt. In winter or early spring, before the summer migrants have arrived, 
 or the hum of insects has begun to stir the air, the sense of hearing is 
 not excited by any form of sound. There are neither men nor children 
 
 J Dead Giant, Mark Ask. 
 
 in this part of the wood, the cattle are away on distant lawns, the deer 
 are hidden in the thick inclosures, and the great birds which haunt the 
 forest are away, in the still grander and more solemn precincts of 
 the most ancient woods. Beyond Emery Down the high wood gives 
 place to a rolling natural park, clothed with heather, cotton grass, and 
 gray whortle bushes, and studded with single trees, or small groups, in 
 pairs and triplets, of perfect form. Here is seen that phase of beauty so 
 often desired and seldom found, distance in the forest, bounded only by 
 
i6 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 a far-ofF misty screen of luxuriant wood. Beyond this open park, the 
 imagination is kept in constant excitement and expectation by the 
 increasing size and beauty of the trees. Each group seems to surpass 
 the Jast, and to mark the ultimate limits of grace and size, until some- 
 thing even grander and more stately takes the pride of place. Their 
 splendour dominates the mind to the exclusion of all other subjects of 
 thought. You become a connoisseur not only in their general beauty 
 but in its particular forms. You analyse them into types, grades, and 
 permanent varieties, and no longer compare them promiscuously, but 
 form standards for the different classes. Some of the finest ancient 
 beeches have apparently been pollarded, and so far from this proving a 
 disfigurement in their ripe maturity, it gives them a variety of form 
 and a spread of limb, which makes a fine contrast with the towering 
 domes which top the single stems of the natural tree. Many of the 
 pollards seem to come late into leaf, and the effect is particularly fine 
 when in spring their ruddy buds surround some other forest giant in 
 the full glory of early growth. 
 
 On the left side of the road, some two and a half miles beyond Emery 
 Down, there is such a group of immense spreading pollards, above which 
 towers the rounded head of an unshrouded tree, capped with a cloud of 
 vivid green floating leaf-buds. 
 
 Opposite the beech circle, a low line of alders gives promise of a 
 swamp, and the ground descends into a "bottom"; not the squashy 
 river of grass usually known by that name in the Surrey coombes, but 
 a flat swampy valley of gray and lichen-covered heather and cotton- 
 grass, scored and intersected by the manifold windings of a slow, 
 dark stream, curling round masses of cattle-gnawed and ivy-strangled 
 alders and sallows, heaped and encumbered with soft mounds of black 
 and gray mud, studded with little bulbous oak stems, stunted and 
 decayed, and shattered by the lightning of the thunder clouds which 
 follow the water. The struggle for life against water and lightning 
 must also be made heavier by the force of the wind in this valley of 
 desolation, for even the tough alders had been uprooted by the gales, 
 and lay prostrate in the marsh, with cavernous hollows beneath their 
 roots haunted by water-rats and tiny trout. In the most stagnant parts 
 white limbs of drowned oaks raise their skeleton arms above the marsh. 
 
THE NEW FOREST 17 
 
 and the ragged ponies which graze round the margin, test carefully at 
 each step the ground in which so many of their companions have sunk 
 and perished when weak with winter and famine. 
 
 The colouring of this swampy hollow is in complete contrast to the 
 brilliant tints of the sound lawns and high woods. It has only two tones, 
 gray and black. Yet even there the finishing touch of nature completes 
 the picture. The black stream and alder clumps are fringed and studded 
 with golden marsh marigolds, and over the gray mud creeps an exquisite 
 little plant with five-lobed leaves and gray starry flowers like silver stone- 
 crop. A low ridge of better soil divides this slow rivulet of the swamp 
 from the bright waters of a typical New Forest stream, the Lymington 
 river. On its banks the solemn beeches once more cluster, and the 
 hurrying stream goes dancing through the wood golden clear with topaz 
 lights, past the lines of columned trees, slipping from pool to pool with 
 little impatient rushes, resting a moment in the deeper pools, then climb- 
 ing the pebble beds which bar them in, and hurrying down to the sea, 
 at Lymington Haven. 
 
 This river, like that at Beaulieu, belongs wholly to the forest. 
 Here it is a mere brook, with exquisitely rounded banks of turf and 
 moss, as if the wood fairies who put the acorn and beech nuts to bed 
 for the winter had tucked in the coverlet on either side and then 
 embroidered it with flowers. The pools are full of enormous "boatmen" 
 which lurk under the banks and dart out at every leaf, insect or 
 stick which comes floating down the stream. Each morsel is seized, 
 pulled about and examined by the creatures, like a company of 
 custom-house officers at a port, and as a steady rain of debris from the 
 trees descends upon the stream throughout the day they are kept busy 
 from dawn till dusk. Even so near its source this stream sometimes 
 overflows its banks. In one spot the whole of the surface roots of a 
 beech have been pared clear of soil as if by a trowel. It is not a large 
 tree, but the spread of root is fifteen paces across. 
 
 West of the river the ancient trees once more close in towards the 
 road, and beyond them on either side are younger woods planted by the 
 Crown. Very few young trees appear in this part of the old forest, but 
 on the right hand of the path is a beautiful example of tree protecting 
 tree from the destroying cattle. A most ancient crab-tree, hoary with 
 
 B 
 
1 8 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 lichen and green with ivy, has thrown its protecting arms round the stem 
 of a fine young oak. The smooth clean stem now shoots up clear of the 
 old crabtree, whose delicate pink blossom mixed with the black ivy 
 berries, shows that it is vigorous still in spite of its double burden of 
 carrying the ivy and caring for the oak. 
 
 An example of the astonishing detail and completeness of the natural 
 beauties of the forest, beauty presented on a scale so large, that the 
 absence of detail and ornament might well pass unobserved, may be 
 seen round the stem of every great tree that fronts the road. Take for 
 instance the base of the beech column which stands opposite to the grass 
 track that leads to the left to the charcoal burner's hut below Mark Ash. 
 It is the base of a compound column, thicker than the piers of Durham 
 Cathedral, with seven projecting pilasters. The bark is like gray frosted 
 silver, crusted in parts with a scale ornament of lichen, and in the 
 interstices between the pillars with short golden-brown moss. The 
 rounded niches which encircle its base are laid out as natural gardens ; 
 which in April of the present year were planted and arranged as follows. 
 In one a violet bed, covered with blossoms which touched the bark of 
 the trunk. In the next a briar-rose, a foot high in young leaf. In the 
 third three curling fronds of bracken fern. In the fourth a moss-grown 
 billet of sere wood, and a pile of last year's beech mast. In the fifth a 
 young woodbine, which had slipped into the inmost crevice between 
 the sheltering pilasters, and was already adorned with little whorls of 
 green leaves. In the sixth a wood sorrel, with trefoils of exquisite green- 
 like chrysoprase, and in the seventh niche four seedling hollies, a tiny 
 rowan tree, and a seedling beech as high as a pencil. The whole was 
 encircled by a close carpet of moss turf, and the tUhris of leaves. The 
 eye sees these minor beauties in series and succession ; but no mere 
 catalogue can convey an adequate idea of the delight and satisfaction 
 afforded to the mind by this prodigal abundance of natural ornament. 
 
 The cries of the woodland birds, which hitherto had hardly broken the 
 silence of the forest, showed that the attractions of cover, food, and water 
 must be combined in a measure not yet encountered in the adjacent 
 glades. The bright sun poured between the green leaves and reached the 
 dark hollows among the pines below, and the wood rang with the cries of 
 the larger and rarer birds which have here their haunt. The hooting and 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 19 
 
 yelping of the owls, though it was noon-day, was almost like the inter- 
 mittent cry of hounds that have strayed from the pack, and are hunting 
 some solitary deer. The laughing of the woodpecker, the harsh and 
 angry screams of the jays, the crow of the cock pheasant, and the cuckoo's 
 call, showed that animal life, hitherto so scarce in this wealth of arboreal 
 growth was here abundant and in evidence. The only trace of man's 
 presence was the rudest and most primitive dwelling known to civilized 
 
 Charcoal Burner's Hut, Bolderzvood. 
 
 life. In the centre of a clearing, surrounded on three sides by a towering 
 ring of monster beeches, was a deserted charcoal burner's hut, with the 
 "burning circle" in front of the door. Except for the setting of good 
 English trees it might pass for part of the kraal of some race of wood- 
 land dwarfs, with its " zeriba " in front. The last is a large circle of 
 brushwood, supported by posts and rails of rough oak-poles. Within 
 was a flooring of black ashes, neatly raked into a raised ring at a few feet 
 from the circumference. 
 
 B 2 
 
20 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 The hut looks like a white ants' hill covered with scales of turf 
 turned grass inwards, with a kind of mushroom cup on the apex. The 
 only sign that the dwelling was not constructed by savages is the square 
 door and porch, hewn of roughly squared oak. A glimpse of the interior 
 shows that the framework is a cope of strong oak poles, and the only 
 furniture a couple of sacks of dry beech leaves, a low wooden bench, and 
 one or two iron pots. A similar hut in Gritnam wood is inhabited 
 throughout the year by an adder-hunter. He does not even indulge in 
 the luxury of a beech leaf mattress or a wooden door ; but lives in health 
 and comfort with a low oak bench for his bed, and a faggot of heather 
 for curtain and door. 
 
 A narrow glen and stream, with an ascent bare of trees forms a kind 
 of precinct, before the last and inmost circle of the wood, where the 
 neophyte may pause, and see revealed before him, the final and crowning 
 secret of the forest. The voices of Dodona's doves echo softly throbbing 
 from the grove, and invite him " to touch, to see, to enter " and be from 
 henceforth one of the initiated. On either side the enormous beeches rise, 
 some tossing their branches like the arms of Blake's angels, sweeping sky- 
 ward with uplifted hands, others with huge limbs flung supine on the 
 turf, others like slender pillars from which spring fretted vaults and 
 arches, trees male and female, trees of architecture, and trees of life, rising 
 in measured order and gradual succession on the sides of a theatre of 
 woodland turf. Where the solemn aisles diverge they are walled with 
 holly, roofed with the green of the beech, and floored with flesh colour 
 and gold, as the broken lights glitter on the carpet of moss and wind- 
 sown leaves. Half of a clustered beech had fallen in one shock to the 
 ground, smashing into ruin the tall hollies below it, and scattering their 
 broken limbs m a yet wider circle of destruction. The scent of beech 
 and holly from the crushed and broken fragments overpowered all the 
 odours of the forest. Deer had been browsing on the fallen boughs, and 
 three fallow bucks sprang up from behind the ruin and rushed through 
 the hollies beyond. Nine fallen limbs, each a tree itself in size and 
 proportions, lay spread upon the ground like the fingers of a fan. The 
 coating of moss with which it was completely covered made it easy to 
 walk up over the limbs to the point of fracture and thence look down 
 into the forest. In front lay beds of young holly glittering in the sun, the 
 
THE NEW FOREST 21 
 
 ground between them covered with the vivid green of wood-sorrel. 
 Beyond, and around, on every side the towering forms of the gigantic 
 tree? stand clear, each behind each in ordered ranks without movement 
 or sound in the still air, except for the cooing of the ring-doves and the 
 screams of the wood-owls moving in the forest. It is a temple without 
 walls, with a thousand pillars and a thousand gates, aisles innumerable 
 and arches multiplex, so lofty, so light, so ancient and so fair that it seems 
 the work not of natural growth but of some enchantment, which has 
 raised it in the forest far from the home of man, unpeopled, untrodden 
 and alone. 
 
 Such is the ancient wood of Mark Ash, in itself, its setting and 
 surroundings. It may be doubted whether elsewhere in England is to be 
 found another to excel it or equal it in the completeness of its beauty, 
 and in the strange perfection of the growth, not only of its trees, but of 
 its turf, its flowers and its lawns, to which the will of man has not 
 contributed the laying of a sod or the setting of a daisy. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CENTRAL FOREST {continued) 
 
 The forest heaths — Beaulieu a?id Ober Heath contrasted — Fleming's th:orns — Matiey Heath 
 and Bog —Flight of the woodcocks at dusk up Matley Passage — • Denn"^ Bog by tzcilight — 
 Alum Green and the Roman Arch — The Knightwood oak — Heronry in Finney Ridge — 
 Toung herons ; buzzards ; the adder-hunter- — Brockenhurst — Night in the forest. 
 
 The sense of freedom and limitless distance which always accompanies 
 a forest walk is never more complete than when the traveller emerges 
 from roaming in the great woods or thick plantations and finds himself 
 on one of the wide heaths which stretch for miles beside the woodlands, 
 and are themselves surrounded by distant lines of forest beyond which 
 lie heaths, and yet more forest far away down to the shores of the Solent. 
 Beaulieu Heath is perhaps the finest of the open stretches of forest 
 scenery. There is something so new, fresh and exhilarating in the sudden 
 presentation of this apparently unlimited stretch of high open level 
 ground, swept by the volume of the over-sea wind that comes rolling up 
 from the Channel, which reacts on the mind with a kind of intoxication 
 of space and air. Miles of whispering pines are the background to the heath : 
 beyond all is open, level and free, the ground falling imperceptibly till the 
 near horizon is nothing but a level line of heather, below which the inter- 
 secting waters of the Solent are lost to sight, though the blue hills of the 
 Isle of Wight rise like the background of a panorama, far beyond the 
 invisible strait which lies between. There are those who prefer the forest 
 heaths even to the forest woods. Doubtless each gains by contrast, the 
 more so that the change from the high woods to the sweeping moorland, 
 is often as sudden as the shifting of a scene upon the stage. 
 
 Take for instance the wide stretch of Ober Heath, which fringes the 
 

 SOT ,i»>.| .("PiV- 
 
THE NEW FOREST 23 
 
 great plantations of Rhinefield Walk, and runs almost down to 
 Brockenhurst from the modern castle which has been built upon the site 
 of the keeper's lodge at Rhinefield. The upper portion of the heath is 
 like a scene in the Surrey pine districts, studded with self-sown Scotch 
 fir, and clothed with gorse bushes, rough heather, and a tiny dwarf 
 willow, which creeps upon the ground like ivy, but otherwise is a perfect 
 willow bush, studded in spring with tiny satin globes, like the " palms " of 
 the common osier, but no larger than shot or tare-seed. Far away across 
 the dark purple heather and golden gorse, the quick stream of Ober-water 
 runs through a flat green lawn to join the Brockenhurst river just above 
 New Park, with the hill of Brockenhurst Manor breaking the sky-line 
 to the right. The left side of the heath is fringed by heavy forest ; but 
 in this case the transition from heath to wood is broken by a wide scrub 
 of dwarf thorns, round as beehives, matted with heather, and knots 
 and beards of lichen. Some hundred acres must be covered by 
 " Fleming's thorns," as this dense thicket is called. Those who have 
 seen both, compare it to the mimosa scrub of the African plains. 
 Like the mimosa it is a favourite haunt of game ; and the wild deer 
 love to lie in its secluded and impenetrable jungle. 
 
 No fence or boundary marks the transition from heath to forest. 
 The river slips from the common, between clumps of holly and single 
 waving birches, winds down a glade, and in a few yards is lost to sight 
 among masses of oak, alder, ash, and pines. Looking backwards towards 
 the sunset along this borderland, the rugged outlines of the gorse and fir, 
 and the broken and wind-swept hollies and thorns which fringe the full 
 fed forest, give to the scene an air of wildness and confusion in striking 
 contrast to the serene tranquillity which reigns within the solemn precints 
 of the woods. Ober Heath is an example of the forest moor inclosed by 
 wooded hills. On Matley Heath, south of Lyndhurst, the converse may 
 be seen ; a barren heather-clad hill rising steadily from low wooded ground 
 on either side, and then descending in a long and gentle slope to an immense 
 expanse of flat and barren moor. This wild and desolate tract is perhaps 
 the largest unbroken stretch of heather and infertility in the whole forest. 
 Under the names of Matley Heath, Black Down, Yew-tree Heath, and 
 Denny Bog, it stretches east of Lyndhurst in a straight line of five miles 
 to the Beaulieu river. Cobbett, who rode across it after having missed 
 
24 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 his way, and hated heaths because they would not grow his pet swede 
 turnips, calls it " about six miles of heath even worse than Bagshot 
 Heath ; as barren as it is possible for land to be." From Lyndhurst the 
 road gradually ascends, the soil all the way growing thinner and poorer, 
 until the bare gravel shows in white patches and plains among the starved 
 heather. Yet on the right, and at no great distance are thick woods of 
 the finest timber in England, and even on the crest of the hill, a fine 
 rounded wood of beech and oak, Matley Wood, stands up like a fertile 
 island, with a sea of heather and bog round it. To the left lies the great 
 stretch of Matley Bog, and to the right a narrow strip of hard sand where 
 the road creeps round the head of the morass. Here is a picture which, 
 but for the road and bridge cannot have changed for a thousand years. 
 A stream flows down from a wide valley in the thick woods, and spreads 
 itself among green marshes, sedge, and alder copses, at the top of the bog, 
 whose level and impassable plain loses itself in the black heath which 
 stretches far beyond the railway into the southern forest. At dusk, 
 the woodcocks, which rest in the forest, come flying up from the bog to 
 the woods. On the last day of April of the present year, at a quarter 
 before eight, the woodcocks were already on the wing. Night was set- 
 tling down on the heath, but the horizon was still light above the hill, 
 and tall clouds were passing across the west. A sound came from 
 the bog, like the twittering of swallows on the wing, mixed with low 
 croaking cries. Then a bird with steady flight like that of a curlew 
 on the mud-flats came up out of the dusk, and crossed the road, uttering 
 its curious call at regular intervals, and making straight for the head of 
 the woodland glen. This was followed by a pair, which, after crossing 
 the road flew tilting at one another, and turning and twisting in the air 
 all round the semi-circle of lofty trees which crown the hollow in the 
 woods. Bird after bird then flew up from the bog, until the forest glen 
 was full of their dusky forms twisting and twining, like swallows or fern 
 owls, against the evening sky. 
 
 Next day a young woodcock was brought into Lyndhurst ; it had 
 been caught in the wood close to the Lyndhurst race-course, the rest 
 of the brood were seen hiding close by, with their heads laid upon the 
 ground and bodies motionless like young plover, while the parent 
 bird flew round, and endeavoured to decoy the lad who found them 
 
^ 
 
 cq 
 
26 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 from the spot. This young bird was a most beautiful creature, no 
 longer covered with down, but fully fledged to all ^appearance, and 
 adorned with the beautiful brown mottling which makes the wood- 
 cock's plumage one of the most perfect pieces of tone-ornament in 
 nature. As the night creeps on, blurring every minor feature of the 
 scene, and leaving only the faint gleam of waters and the black forms of 
 the alder clumps from distance to distance in the bog, the cry of the 
 wild-fowl, echoed by the dark wall of forest at the back, shows that 
 all the natives of the marsh are awake and moving. The croak of the 
 woodcocks, the calling and screaming of the plovers, the bleating of the 
 snipe, and the harsh barking of the herons, winging their way from 
 Vinney Ridge to the Beaulieu river, fill the air with sound, though the 
 creatures themselves are invisible; while from the forest the yelping and 
 screeching of the owls, the incessant drone of the " churr worms," and the 
 whirr of the great wood-beetles, answers the calls from the open moor. 
 At such times the stranger will do well to seek the road and return 
 across the heath ; for once entangled in the great woods which lie 
 southward of the marsh, he may well be lost till morning. In the angle 
 between this mass of forest and the railway, lies Denny Bog, a more 
 distant and even more picturesque portion of this irreclaimable waste. 
 The words bog, marsh and swamp are often used indifferently. Properly 
 understood they apply to widely difl^erent conditions. 
 
 A bog is a portion of ground lying in soak. In the forest they are 
 found of all sizes, from the area of a dining-room table to that of Hyde 
 Park. The rim of the bog is hard enough to prevent the escape of 
 the water except by gradual soakage, and thus the service is level. Yet 
 the beauty of the bogs is known and appreciated by every " forester," 
 though they are a fruitful source of disaster to riders who do not 
 know how they often lurk under the very shadow of the timber at 
 the edge of the sound land of the woods. There is a tiny bog on the 
 edge of Gritnam Wood which may serve as an example. On the verge 
 of the common which lies below the wood is a pretty little circle of 
 golden moss, with patches of green grass, and pools of black water no 
 larger than a man's hand. Towards the centre the colouring is as bril- 
 liant as that of sea- weeds and sea-anemones seen in sunlit water. The 
 mosses grow into spongv pillows, with exquisite feathery fronds. Some 
 
THE NEW FOREST 27 
 
 of this moss is rose-pink ; other kinds brilliant green, or tawny brown, 
 and from the whole comes a scent like that of fern roots. A man may 
 walk across in safety, but a horse breaks through the spongy surface, and 
 nearly always falls, throwing its rider in the process, for the sucking 
 mosses prevent any effort at recovering its footing after the first stumble. 
 
 Herons, like the monks of old, seem always to choose a picturesque 
 site for their home. Their home in the wooded hills of Wytham, look- 
 ing far far across the flats of the upper Thames valley, or in the tall 
 pines of Woolmer Forest, near the Deer's Hut common, in the steep 
 cliffs of the Findhorn river, and last, but not least beautiful, the heronry 
 in the thick plantation at the head of the Penn Ponds in Richmond Park, 
 where the London herons build almost unknown to the thousands of 
 visitors who skate upon the lakes in winter, or ride and drive past them 
 in summer, are each the chosen spots in their own beautiful vicinity. 
 The heronry on Vinney Ridge, about four miles from Lyndhurst, is no 
 exception to the rule, and the path to it leads through some of the 
 finest woodland scenery. Part lies along an ancient Roman road, 
 which runs over the summit of Lyndhurst Hill. 
 
 From this the view ranges far to south, west, and east, while at its 
 foot lies Alum Green, perhaps the largest and most beautiful of all the 
 forest lawns. It is a kind of natural " savannah " in the woods. The 
 extent of sound turf covers many acres, dotted with park-like groups of 
 trees, surrounded on all sides with a ring of ancient timber on sloping 
 banks. It is the favourite resort of all the ponies and cattle in this 
 part of the Forest. The ancient path joins the main road to Christchurch, 
 near the Lymington stream, about a mile below the bridge which crosses 
 it on the way to Mark Ash. Here also is a bridge, of a single arch of 
 brick. The stream comes hurrying down to this through the open 
 forest. Three tributaries have already swelled its waters between this 
 and the upper crossing-place, and river and banks alike are deeper and 
 even lovelier than before. The broken banks are planted, wreathed, and 
 fringed by every kind of forest flower, shrub, and fern, of the largest 
 and most luxuriant growth. Anemones, cuckoo-flowers, violets, king- 
 cups, young bracken, and hard-fern, woodbine and wild rose, heart's- 
 tongue, and moss like lengths of velvet cover the banks, the beech- 
 boughs arch the stream, and on each side the open wood extends to the 
 
28 rHE NEW FOREST 
 
 utmost limit of sight. The otters make this part of the river their 
 summer home. Two young ones were recently dug out from the earth 
 a short way below the " Gate House," which stands near the bridge, and 
 during the day they frequently lie up, either in the dry forest near, or 
 under the roots of a big tree by the banks. The habits of the New 
 Forest otters on this stream seem very well known to those who are 
 interested either in hunting or observing them. They travel a long way 
 down the river at night, perhaps past Brockenhurst and as far as 
 Boldre, or even below to near Lymington. They then hunt the stream 
 upwards in the early morning until they reach the narrow waters, where 
 they stay during the day. The pack of otter-hounds, which generally 
 visits the forest in the early summer, usually meet at Brockenhurst or 
 some other point down stream and pick up the fresh " drag " of the 
 otters, which have returned up stream in the early hours of the morning. 
 Hunted deer also make for the water at this point, and endeavour to 
 throw off the pack before seeking refuge in the thick recesses of Knight- 
 wood and Vinney Ridge. A fallow buck finds the dimensions of the 
 stream quite adequate for the temporary destruction of scent. Slipping 
 down some tributary brooklet it will pick its way down to a pool, and 
 then, gently sinking, until nothing but head and horns remain above 
 water, lies as motionless as a squatted hare listening to the shouts, talk- 
 ing, casting, and excitement on either bank, until refreshed and invigor- 
 ated it springs once more to the bank and leads its pursuers another 
 circle through the woods and bogs of the forest. 
 
 North of the road, a little beyond the " Roman Arch," as tradition 
 calls this bridge, is the inclosure of Knight wood. This large wood, 
 though in part replanted in 1867, contains many remnants of ancient 
 forest embedded in the new timber, among other the celebrated Knight- 
 wood Oak. Thus it shows in juxtaposition both the artificial and 
 natural modes of reproducing forest. On the edges of the wood are 
 close plantations of Scotch fir, in formal rows, which shelter and direct 
 the upward growth of the young oaks between. In the centre, where 
 old trees have died and been removed, or have in past time cleared a 
 space which their present height leaves free to light and air, young oaks, 
 birches, and beeches are growing in irregular masses and of all heights 
 and sizes. Among this confused multitude is the great Knightwood Oak 
 
K?iightzvood Oak, Mark Ash. 
 
30 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 This forest king stands in a smooth round lawn, all other trees keep- 
 ing their distance beyond the outermost circle of its branches. The 
 main trunk of the oak rises like a smooth round Norman pillar, and at 
 no great height breaks into eight limbs which radiate from it like the 
 sticks of a fan, in very straight and regular lines. The extremities of 
 these show signs of decay, but the tree seems as firm as ever. Its rigidity 
 is such that in a heavy gale, though the tops of the branches move, the 
 mass of the tree seems as stiff as if cast in iron. The limbs, though 
 untouched by decay, are coated nearly to the summit by thick green 
 moss, and the effect of this symmetrical mass of timber springing from a 
 trunk of such magnitude — its girth is 19^ feet — is beyond description 
 dignified and imposing. The tallest beeches in the forest are probably 
 those in which the herons build in the Vinney Ridge inclosure, on the 
 opposite side of the Christ Church Road from Knightwood. The wood 
 lies on the top of a fine saddle-back hill, covered with trees of every 
 kind, except elm, and of all ages, from old ivy-bound oaks to immense 
 beeches and thorn-bushes wreathed with woodbine. There is a far 
 greater extent of open turf here than in most " inclosures," and when 
 the fences are removed in 1899, which is the date fixed for its 
 disenclosure, it will take its place as a natural part of the ancient 
 forest. 
 
 The beeches in which the herons build are so lofty as to lift their 
 summits above the natural angle of sight, even as the head is 
 usually carried in the forest ; if it were not for the glimpses of the 
 great birds silently launching themselves from the tree-tops before 
 their disturber has approached the nest, the existence of the colony would 
 not be suspected. It was the flight of a single heron slipping noiselessly 
 from the nest, and soaring back in a wide circle to watch over the brood, 
 that first indicated to the present writer that he was in the heronry. 
 Even then the height of the trees, their distance apart, and the thickness 
 of the foliage at the top made the discovery of the nest no easy task, 
 had not the clattering noise made by the young indicated their where- 
 abouts. The presence of birds of prey, though usually screened from 
 sight by the thickness of the forest, was well illustrated by an incident 
 which took place after the momentary flight of the old herons. A 
 sparrow-hawk dashed up through the wood, and poising itself above the 
 
K? 
 
 ^" 
 
 ''\% 
 
 ppdn^^^ 
 
 vv^MP*^ 
 
 p; 
 
 V 
 
 >^ 
 
 • 
 
 
 If'*'' 
 
 f ■' 
 
 
 
 
 ^0 
 
 s 
 
 ^ 
 
 bN 
 
32 rHE NEW FOREST 
 
 trees, flew from nest to nest, looking down into them from a height of a 
 few feet, and apparently expecting to find a brood small enough for one 
 to be carried off before the old birds returned. The hawk's visit only 
 lasted for a minute, for at that moment five old herons came sweeping 
 over the wood, and remained soaring in hurried and anxious flight far 
 above the tops of the loftiest trees. When we retired to some distance 
 and stood still by a timber stack, bird after bird pitched on the trees, and 
 after one or two subdued croaks of greeting, flapped down into the nest. 
 The eyries appear absolutely inaccessible, built, as they are, at heights of 
 from seventy to ninety feet from the ground on trees which rise two- 
 thirds of that height without a single branch. Yet they are climbed, 
 otherwise the inquiry as to whether you " could do with some young 
 herons " — or young " cranes," for both names are used in the forest — 
 would not be addressed to those who are known to have a taste for 
 keeping odd pets so often as it is. 
 
 There are a few ancient inhabitants who still know the favourite 
 nesting places, not only of the herons, but of rarer birds, such as 
 the common and honey-buzzard. The forest is said to be the last 
 breeding place of the honey-buzzard left in England, and there is no 
 reason, in the present condition of the woodlands, why either of these 
 birds should forsake the district, except in the prices offered for their 
 eggs by "oologists." The keepers protect a nest when found, and as the 
 honey-buzzard does not lay till summer is well advanced, there is more 
 chance of its nest escaping observation than for those of the early- 
 building birds. 
 
 The strangest survival of any industry connected with the taking of 
 wild animals in the forest is that of the " Adder-hunter," probably the 
 very last representative in England of a race who for upwards of two 
 centuries have contributed their strange nostrum of adder's fat to the 
 pharmacopoeias of central and western Europe. The last of the Adder- 
 hunters is a strikingly handsome man, probably past his sixtieth year, short, 
 with curling beard and hair, and equipped in what is probably a unique 
 costume for his peculiar trade. Thick boots and gaiters protect him 
 from the chance of a bite from the snakes. He is slung all over with 
 bags of sacking, his pockets are stuffed with tins and boxes, and from his 
 chest hangs a pair of long steel forceps. In his hand he carries a light 
 
rHE NEW FOREST 
 
 zz 
 
 stick with a ferrule, into which when he rouses a snake he puts in a 
 short forked piece of hazel wood, and, darting it forward with unerring 
 
 The Adder-Catcker. 
 
 aim, pins the adder to the ground. Stooping down he picks it up lightly 
 with the forceps, and after holding the writhing creature up for a 
 moment, in which he looks like a rustic ^sculapius, he transfers it to his 
 
 c 
 
34 I'HE NEW FOREST 
 
 sack, Mr. Mills, or " Brusher," as he is known among his friends, is a well- 
 known and popular character in the forest, and his services in keeping 
 down the number of adders are considerable. From March to September 
 he ranges the forest, and his largest "bag" was i6o adders in a month. 
 These he boils down, and prepares from their flesh the " adder's fat," 
 which he sells. Its virtues have been known for so many centuries, and 
 the favour with which extremely penetrating unguents, such as lanoline, 
 made from the fat of sheep's wool, are now regarded, justifies the reputa- 
 tion it enjoys. The belief that it is a remedy for the bite of the snake 
 itself may rest on slender grounds. But for the odd list of accidents 
 given by the old man — " sprains, black eyes, poisoning with brass, bites 
 by rats and horses, rheumatic joints, and sore feet in men and dogs," it 
 is admitted by the general consent of the forest to be a sovereign balm. 
 In winter the Adder-hunter's occupation is gone, but he has other modes 
 of making a livelihood, and his lodging throughout the year is in the 
 woods, in the snug interior of a charcoal-burner's hut. 
 
 Brockenhurst, unlike Lyndhurst, which, with all its picturesque 
 features, bears itself like a little town, is a true village, imbedded in 
 the forest. Here the ground is stiff clayey loam, suitable for the 
 growth of oaks, and consequently for corn and arable land. The 
 square fields, with hedgerows, which fringe the village give an uneasy 
 sense of limit and confinement after the free and open woodlands. 
 But the cultivated land is a mere patch, lost to sight and memory 
 in a few minutes' walk from the village. The church stands apart 
 on a little hill, a perfect forest shrine, ringed by a double circle of 
 oaks, between which lie the graves, sprinkled with primroses that have 
 crept out from the wood, and spread their flowers shyly on the church- 
 yard turf. Like the new church of Lyndhurst, the building stands upon 
 a green mount, A giant yew, sound and vigorous, with a solid stem 
 eighteen feet in girth, overshadows the red-brick tower, and reaches 
 halfway up the spire. In front of this tree stand the dead fragments 
 of an oak. The age of this ruin of a tree is almost beyond conjecture, 
 but its position gives some clue to its date. Part of one branch survives. 
 This limb, which appears to be some six feet in diameter, must have 
 passed across the space on which the greater part of the yew now stands, 
 at a height of thirteen feet from the ground. Thus when the ancient 
 

 
 
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 i ;.i ■' 
 
 
 cq 
 
36 
 
 THE NEIV FOREST 
 
 yew was a mere shrub, not so high as the great limb of the oak, the latter 
 must have attained its full dimensions ; for the yew is a tree of perfect 
 growth, straight, upright, and unmarred by crowding or shade, which 
 must have been the case had it grown up when the oak-bough was large 
 enough to overshadow it. The shell of the oak measures twenty-five feet 
 
 
 \ 
 
 Bridge near Brockenhnrst. 
 
 round ; and the centuries of the growth of the yew must be the measure 
 of the decline and fall of this primeval oak. 
 
 At dusk, when the heavy clouds descend and brood in long lines 
 across the woods, with bars of pale white sky below, the scene between 
 Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst is singularly wild and pleasing. The white 
 and waning light in the west is broken by the sharp outlines of the 
 rugged firs, and reflected in pale sheets in the swampy pools which 
 line the river. The woods are studded with clumps of holly, whose 
 
THE NEW FOREST 37 
 
 opaque black outline contrasts with the gnarled and twisted limbs of 
 the ancient pollarded oaks native to this stiff and vigorous soil. As 
 the dusk creeps on the night-sounds of the forest are more distinctly 
 heard. The splashing of the ponies' feet as they crop the grass of the 
 swamps, the neighing of the forest mares as they call their foals, and the 
 distant tinkle of the cattle-bells, sound through the trees, and shadowy 
 forms of deer canter across the rides. Voices of children, calling or 
 crying in the deep wood, are among the startling and unexpected sounds 
 of night in the forest. More than once the writer has left the track and 
 hastened into the grove, only to see the fire of a gipsy camp, with 
 the children and parents lying at the mouth of their tent, lighted and 
 warmed by the glow of their beech-wood fire. The smell of the woods 
 on a still night, when dew is falling, is the essence of a thousand years 
 distilling in the soil of this virgin forest. It baffles description ; suffice 
 it to say, as Herodotus did of Arabia Felix, " from this country comes 
 an odour, wondrous sweet." Nor are true perfumes wanting, where 
 wafts of the scent of sweetbriar come across the path, or an unseen bed 
 of hyacinths fringes the road. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WILD DEER AND FOREST PONIES 
 
 Unique character of hujit'mg i?i the '■'■High Woods'''' — Survival of the zvild deer — A spring 
 meet at New Parlc — Rousing deer zvith tufters — Old Moonstone — Laying on the 
 pack — Full cry in the forest — Number of deer killed — -The forest ponies — Their 
 importance to the Commoners — Arab blood — Their feral habits — Improvefnent and 
 fnaintenance of the breed — The Pony Shozv at Lyndhurst. 
 
 The forest was created as a hunting-ground, and such it still 
 remains. The fox is regularly hunted, and the otter-hounds visit 
 Brockenhurst in spring. But the beasts of the chase peculiar to the 
 district are the wild red and fallow deer, which are hunted amid 
 settings and surroundings absolutely unique in England. 
 
 Their continued existence is one instance in many of the natural 
 survival of what is appropriate to the forest. When the deer were 
 over-preserved by the Crown, their presence led to endless ill-will and 
 demoralisation. From 7,000 to 8,000 head are said to have lived 
 within and about the boundaries of the forest at the end of the last 
 century. Such a stock was far larger than the natural resources of the 
 ground could maintain. In the winter they were partly fed by hay 
 grown for them at New Park, Even so they frequently starved in 
 hard weather, and it is said that in the winter of 1787 three hundred 
 were found dead in one walk. The reaction from this over-preservation 
 went almost as far in the opposite direction. The " Deer Removal Act " 
 M'as passed in 1851. The greater number were taken in the "toils" 
 — high nets still kept in most deer parks — and most of the rest were 
 shot down by sportsmen. But they have survived all efforts at their 
 
THE NEW FOREST 39 
 
 destruction, and their increase in the thick and quiet plantations is now 
 steadily maintained. 
 
 Towards the close of the season, late in April, a day with the New 
 Forest deerhounds presents from meet to finish a series of pictures of 
 sylvan sport, in the full glory of the English spring, each of which might 
 be illustrated from the plays of Shakespeare and the old ballad poetry of 
 England. Take for example the scene at a meet late in April of the 
 present year, under the tall oaks at New Park. Three men, born and 
 bred in the forest, sons of woodmen, dressed in brown velveteen, tlT,ick 
 boots, and gaiters, were leaning against the oaks. Each wore across his 
 shoulders long thongs of leather, with loops and swivels of steel, working 
 examples of those mysterious ornaments of white and gold with which 
 the Master of the Oueen's Buckhounds is girded as he leads the royal 
 procession on the Cup day at Ascot. These are the " couples," for 
 holding the pack, until the time comes to lay them on upon the scent of 
 the deer, which the " tufters " have driven from cover. Three or four 
 red-scarved, black-muzzled forest gipsies strolled up and formed a group 
 under another oak, little dark active laughing orientals, a strange contrast 
 to the sturdy foresters. The old adder-catcher next joined the party ; he 
 had hunted the forest as he came, and flung down upon the ground from 
 his wallet a pair of writhing snakes. The " kennels " are good customers 
 for his adder's fat, as it is believed not only to be useful to reduce sprains 
 and injuries in horse and hound, but also as a remedy against the adder 
 poison should a hound be bitten in the forest. A gipsy family followed, 
 ragged, unkempt, " happy as birds and hard as nails," as a forester described 
 them, taking the meet on their most leisurely way to Brockenhurst. An 
 old woman, the present patriarch of the forest gipsies, led the way, in a 
 cloak of enormous squares ot scarlet and black, which covered the basket 
 she carried like a tent, and a poke-bonnet. Another younger woman, in 
 a true " witches' hat " with elf locks hanging from below, and a tribe of 
 most ragged children, sockless, shoeless, some pushing a little cart in 
 which lay their tents, others straying and returning like little wild 
 animals, were amusing themselves by imitating a pack of hounds in full 
 cry. Soon the pack appeared, with huntsman and whips in coats of 
 Lincoln green, and couples across their breasts, and though the hounds 
 
40 THE NEJV FOREST 
 
 are no longer like those which Theseus bid the forester " uncouple in the 
 western valley," 
 
 " With ears that sweep away the morning dew, 
 Crook-kneed and dewlapped like Thcssalian bulls 
 Slow in pursuit," 
 
 they are still " matched in mouth like bells," and their greater speed and 
 symmetry does not detract from the pleasure of listening in the forest to 
 
 " The musical confusion 
 Of hounds and echo in conjunction," 
 
 which the hero proposed to Queen Hippolyta. A sharp-faced man 
 *' lunging " a forest pony, and one or two mounted woodmen and keepers, 
 completed the party, until the " field " cast up rapidly, the master in 
 Lincoln green, the rest in quiet blacks and browns. The hounds were 
 then divided by the whips into groups, and the couples fastened, each 
 thong being linked to a pair of hounds. Thus one man has to hold from 
 three to six couple, and that picturesque poise of men stepping backwards 
 with arms extended and dragging reluctant hounds which has been 
 painter's and sculptor's subject for centuries is reproduced in perfection. 
 One ancient and sagacious hound, by name Moonstone, was omitted from 
 the coupling process. Satisfied that for it the honour was reserved of 
 finding and separating the deer, it trotted alone at the heels of the hunts- 
 man's horse, with an air of sagacity and importance most edifying to 
 behold. After " secret consults " with one or two woodmen, who had 
 marked deers in the early morning, the huntsman led the way through 
 thick and beautiful plantations, the coupled hounds and the field following 
 in long procession. On every side the wood rang with the spring notes 
 of birds, the laugh of the woodpecker, the cry of the cuckoo, while starry 
 beds of violet and primrose, and everywhere the sight and scent of leaves 
 and flowers, made an unusual and beautiful setting to the animated 
 groups of riders, horses, and .'hounds. 
 
 The pack and field halted in a rough common deep in heather and 
 furze, shut in on three sides by plantations, and on the fourth by the 
 ancient timber of Gritnam wood. The huntsman and a mounted 
 keeper, with the old " tufter " Moonstone, then trotted into a large 
 
THE NEW FOREST 41 
 
 enclosure on the farther side. " Come on, old dog ! " called the hunts- 
 man, as the hound stopped to feather on either side of the beautiful 
 green ride up which the two men were trotting. The keeper pulled up 
 his cob, and pointed to a clump of beeches surrounded by low brambles 
 and thorns, remarking, "There were three bucks there this morning." 
 The hound, which had been casting from side to side of the walk and 
 through the cover, now bounded towards the beeches, and with a crash 
 three bucks sprang to their feet, and rushed through the wood, followed 
 by the loud and musical baying of the hound. The deer did not break 
 at once, and there was time to join the groups in the common and watch 
 the dispersion of the inhabitants of the plantation, as the hound twisted 
 and turned after the bucks. A big fox stepped out, and a doe crossed, 
 eliciting a chorus of impatient whimpers from the pack before whose eyes 
 it passed. Then the three bucks crossed the open, followed by the single 
 hound, whose deep voice was heard for many minutes as he drove them 
 through the next covert. A blast on the horn now gave the signal that 
 the deer had separated, and half a dozen willing hands led the coupled 
 hounds to the ancient wood in which they were to be laid upon the scent. 
 The long line of men and hounds, followed by the well-mounted field, 
 hurried along through the long narrow glades of a most beautiful and 
 ancient wood of oaks, or under arcades of crab-blossoms, ragged gipsies, 
 brown-coated foresters, hounds and riders, all gradually hurrying on till 
 the whole cavalcade was pushing at a trot through the forest. A pretty 
 little black-eyed boy was leading old Moonstone (literally by a string). 
 " I likes deer-hunting, though 'tis a cruel sport, for the deer does us no 
 harm," he remarked sententiously, as the procession grouped itselt round 
 the huntsman, who was sitting alert and eager on his horse in a green ride 
 at the highest point of the wood, where the single buck had crossed. 
 All the hounds were now eager and happy, with heads up, sterns waving. 
 In a few moments they were uncoupled, and dashed down through the 
 wood. If the scene was not a reproduction of Tudor or Plantagenet 
 days, the picture of the early poets is sadly misread. Hounds, all black, 
 white, and tan, spread fanlike across the forest, flinging to right and left, 
 each giving tongue as it owned the scent ; master, huntsman, and whips 
 in Lincoln green, under the lights and branching canopy of most ancient 
 beeches ; well-mounted and well-dressed riders, in the costume, sober in 
 
42 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 colours, sound in texture, which good taste and good sense have elaborated 
 into the perfection of simplicity, now seen, now lost, as they gallop down 
 the glades, among the tall gray pillars of the beech-trunks, and the gossamer 
 green of little thorns, and bushes of ivy and wild rose. Surely some 
 such scene as this must have been in the mind of the author of the 
 Allegro^ when he bids the reader 
 
 " At his window bid good morrow, 
 Through the sweetbriar, or the vine, 
 Or the twisted eglantine. 
 
 " Oft listening how the hounds and horn 
 Cheerly rouse the slumbering morn, 
 From the side of some hoar hill. 
 Through the high wood echoing shrill." 
 
 A favourite device of a hunted stag in the New Forest is to make 
 for the wood in which other deer are lying, and disturb them, carrying 
 the trail right over their " forms." The difficulty of keeping hounds 
 together when so composed in a thick extensive plantation is very great, 
 and it often happens that, while the main body of the pack keep to the 
 scent of the hunted deer, small parties of hounds, or even a single hound, 
 break off and enjoy a hunt on their own account. It is on record that on 
 one occasion the pack separated into three, each of which division killed 
 a deer. One doe was hunted and killed by three hounds only, who were 
 found eating the carcass. The single efforts of a staghound which is 
 driving a deer are often extremely interesting, as an example of the per- 
 severance, skill, and instinct combined possessed by the modern breed. On 
 the day the opening of which has been described, a stray hound hunted a 
 buck for a full hour without driving it from one large plantation, giving 
 tongue at intervals, and sticking to the scent without the encouragement 
 either of its own companion or of a single rider. At last, a fine fallow 
 buck, which had not yet shed its horns, broke from the enclosure, and 
 cantered lightly across the open common, ringing twice or thrice round 
 clumps of bushes, and lying down for a few minutes to cool itself, though 
 apparently not at all distressed, in a boggy pool. It then leapt a fence 
 into a plantation. The hound then made its exit from the wood, and 
 took up the scent at a swinging gallop, giving tongue loudly at first, but 
 
THE NEW FOREST 43 
 
 soon becoming silent as it reached the scene of the buck's circle round 
 the bushes. At least ten minutes were required to unravel these 
 difficulties ; but the check did not in the least abate the keenness of the 
 hound, who brought the line up to the wood, and then with a fine burst 
 of " music " dashed into the wood, and there pursued its solitary hunt. 
 
 Stag-hunting in the forest begins in August, and the meets are held 
 through September, November, December, January, March, April, and 
 part of May, thus covering a considerable period when fox-hunting has 
 either ceased or not begun. Probably the late spring hunting is the most 
 novel and picturesque experience which a day with the New Forest stag- 
 hounds affords. But to those who enjoy the sight of hounds working, and 
 at the same time have a taste for beautiful scenery, nothing could well be 
 more delightful. Last season, sixty days' sport averaged about the same 
 number of deer killed. Blank days are unknown, and^ there is the 
 certainty of a run and of a day's enjoyment. 
 
 The New Forest ponies are one of the most interesting features both 
 of the landscape and the life of this wild country. Now that the deer 
 are so few as to have disappeared from common view, they are replaced 
 on the heaths, the lawns, the bogs, and among the ancient trees by the 
 many-coloured, wild-looking forms of these almost feral ponies. There 
 is scarcely any portion of the forest — the inmost recesses of Mark Ash 
 woods, the sea-girt heaths of Beaulieu, the sodden rim of Matley Bog, 
 or the smooth lawns of Alum Green, of Stonycross, or Brockenhurst — 
 from which the ponies are absent. There is no solitude in which their 
 quiet movements, as they tread with careful steps cropping the scanty 
 herbage, do not break the stillness by day and night, no bare hillside so 
 barren but the ponies can find on it some humble plant to crop between 
 the stones. 
 
 The brood mares of the forest are perhaps the nearest approach to 
 the wild horse now existing in this country, so far as their life and 
 habits entitle them to the name. Many of these have run for twenty 
 years in the heaths and woods, unbroken, unshod, and almost without 
 experience of the halter except when " pounded " by the " agisters " for 
 occasional marking. Their graceful walk and elegant shape, their 
 sagacity and hardihood, their speed and endurance, and, not least, the 
 independence and prosperity which their possession confers on the com- 
 
44 "THE NEW forest: 
 
 moners and borderers who live in and around the forest, give to these 
 ponies an interest apart from that attached to the life of any other breed 
 of domesticated animal in this country. Nearly all the work done else- 
 where by large horses seems to be performed in and around the forest 
 by these miniature ponies, drawing miniature carts. Singly, or driven 
 tandem-fashion, they draw bricks, haul loads of brushwood and poles, 
 trot almost any distance to markets and fairs in carts and gigs, and will 
 carry a heavy forester safely and well 
 
 "Over hill, over dale. 
 Through bush, through briar," 
 
 without fatigue or stumble. There is something in the fact of owning 
 horses — be they only ponies — which seems to raise a man in his own 
 esteem, and the jolly foresters have an air and demeanour, whether 
 standing in front of their mud-built cottages, or riding across the heaths 
 to drive in their various stock, which belongs of right to the equestrian 
 order of mankind. 
 
 " The love of pony breeding," writes Mr. W. Moens, of Tweed, 
 near Boldre, one of the most energetic founders of the Association for 
 the Improvement of the Breed of New Forest Ponies, in his pamphlet 
 on the subject, " lies deep in the breasts of most commoners, not only on 
 account of its somewhat speculative nature, but for the animals them- 
 selves. The ponies running in the forest are rarely left for long without 
 being looked after to see how they are doing, or at least being inquired 
 after by their owners, of those living near or working in the forest. 
 Even the very children of borderers know to whom the mares and foals 
 belong, so that the forest ponies afford much amusement to the forest 
 folk, and nothing more easily excites them than a rumour that something 
 or other is about to be done that may injure their interests as regards 
 their pony stock. Some of the large breeders own as many as one 
 hundred or more ponies, many forty or fifty, the smaller occupiers own 
 as many as they can keep in the winter season. These, according to the 
 fancy of the owners, are distributed in various parts of the forest, where 
 they are marked by the agisters, or marksmen, by cutting the hairs of 
 the tails in various ways. Thus the ponies haunting each quarter of the 
 forest are known, the agister comparing his own marks with those made 
 by the owner, and with his description of his ponies. Should any ponies 
 

46 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 stray into the parks, other pastures, or the lanes around the forest, 
 information given to one of the ag-isters causes it to be soon known 
 to whom the straying ponies, which go by the name of ' lane-haunters,' 
 belong." 
 
 The present system of identification has taken the place of a far more 
 picturesque and exciting method of marking the stock, the " Drift of the 
 Forest." This custom was a survival of an Act of Henry VIII., which 
 ordained that all forests and chases were to be driven yearly within 
 fifteen days after Michaelmas, and if any mares or fillies were found which 
 were not likely to bear good foals " the same unprofitable beasts were to 
 be killed and buried." Long after this drastic command had ceased to 
 be regarded, the " Drift " was maintained, as a kind of census for the 
 marking of all forest stock. As nearly as possible on the same day, 
 keepers, agisters, and owners rode out to drive the different walks of the 
 forest towards the pounds. These were not necessarily railed enclosures. 
 The forest hardly contained a fence in the old days, and where, round the 
 few villages, the roads were bordered by fences, the space between was 
 ingeniously used as a trap. At Brockenhurst, for instance, the foals, 
 ponies, cattle, calves, and donkeys were forced towards the lane which, 
 with its high hedges, runs by the side of Brockenhurst Manor towards 
 Beaulieu. Once past the manor mill, by the Boldre River, the gate across 
 the road was shut, and the long lane was filled from end to end with a 
 promiscuous throng of wild and tame beasts, thrusting, neighing, bellow- 
 ing, and crowding, like the spoils of Amalek. From ten to twenty men 
 would join in the work of collecting the animals from the open forest. 
 This needed both skill and knowledge to perform properly. The wilder 
 ponies, who had unpleasant recollections of branding and other rough 
 handling in the pounds, would often make a determined effort to break 
 back, taking their way at speed through the most difficult and treacherous 
 ground. There too, as in the runs of New South Wales, the animals 
 which have been ridden in the business before seemed to take a pleasure in 
 aiding to secure the wild ones, and the most successful means to bring in 
 a fugitive was often for the rider to sit still, and leave the pony he rode 
 to choose its own line, and the time for making the last push which 
 turned the other back to the herd. 
 
 The history of these New Forest ponies is by no means ascertained. 
 
THE NEW FOREST 47 
 
 They are not an indigenous animal like the red deer, but the uniformity 
 in size and appearance suggests a common stock and ancestry. The first 
 is, however, probably due to the almost feral state in which these ponies 
 live in the wild district, from which their food-supply is entirely obtained. 
 No pony above a certain size is likely to survive in the forest, for the 
 simple reason that it cannot find food to maintain it. In winter, by 
 browsing all day and the greater part of the night, hardy little 
 " foresters " of from twelve to thirteen hands high can just make both 
 ends meet, though they are extremely thin and ragged. But anything 
 much above that size would need artificial support, and its progeny 
 would deteriorate. On the other hand, their size does not tend to fall 
 much below the standard at which Nature sets the limit, which, in the 
 case of the New Forest pony, seems to be from twelve to thirteen and a 
 half hands. The natural appetite and needs of these hardy creatures 
 prompt them to do the best for themselves from day to day with a 
 constancy hardly to be understood by human beings whose minds are not 
 concentrated by necessity on the absorbing effort to satisfy the hourly 
 cravings of hunger. Nature levels up as it levels down, and this is 
 probably the clue to the uniformity in size of all wild animals, as well as 
 of these half-wild ponies. 
 
 The condition of this stability is of course that man interferes no- 
 where. But the practice of selecting and selling away from the forest 
 all the best of the ponies did threaten a marked deterioration in the stock 
 about ten years ago, not only in size but in quality. Now the " quality " 
 of the ponies is obvious and unmistakable. They have none of that 
 lumpiness and want of due proportion so often seen in ponies ; on the 
 contrary, they are far more like miniature horses, and horses with a strain 
 of Arab blood in them, as their fine eye, small heads, and high quarters 
 show. Whatever the origin of the ponies in the past, this high-bred 
 appearance has a history, and a very interesting one. They are of the 
 blood of Eclipse, or rather of his sire, supplemented in later years by 
 Arab strains of historical excellence. 
 
 The story of the Arab strain in these ponies is mixed up with one 
 of the earliest romances of the modern thoroughbred. The Duke of 
 Cumberland, son of George II., who in his later years became Ranger of 
 the New Forest, exchanged an Arabian horse for a Yorkshire thorough- 
 
48 rHE NEW FOREST 
 
 bred, which he called Mask, after the place from which it came. 
 Mask was descended from the Darley Arab, brought from Aleppo in 
 the time of Queen Anne, and from the Byerly Turk, thus possessing 
 a pedigree going back to the days of Charles I. Mask was, however, sold 
 for a small sum at the death of the Duke, and remained for some years in 
 the neighbourhood of the New Forest, where he became the sire of num- 
 bers of forest ponies, and also of the celebrated Eclipse. Recently the 
 Queen sent to the forest two thoroughbred Arabs — Abegan and Yirassan 
 — the former a gift of the Imaum of Muscat. Lastly, in 1891, the 
 Association for the Improvement of the Breed of New Forest Ponies was 
 founded at Lyndhurst, which holds an annual show of pony sires, and 
 grants premiums to such as come up to the standard required, on con- 
 dition that they are allowed to run in the forest. This pony show is 
 one of the prettiest sights of the forest year. It is held annually at the 
 end of April, just as the leaves are appearing on the beeches and thorns, 
 not in some formal show-yard in a town, but on a lovely lawn outside 
 Lyndhurst, called Swan Green. 
 
 The beauty of this little sylvan theatre has already been described as 
 the first scene in the forest which presents itself on the way to Mark 
 Ash from Lyndhurst town. The scene at the spring pony show in the 
 present year was a busy contrast to the ordinary quiet of the little green. 
 In these country gatherings the puzzle is to know where the people come 
 from and how they get there. It had been pouring with rain all the 
 morning, and the grove beyond the green was dripping with sunlit 
 showers of drops. Yet a large part of the forest population seemed to 
 be present. Under an oak on the hillside a white pony, saddled but 
 riderless, was cropping the leaves from a thorn-bush, in company with 
 four or five sooty, ragged, wet, long-tailed colts, dragged in from the 
 forest. Smart well-groomed pony stallions were showing off their 
 paces on the road on either side. In the centre a ring of about an acre 
 had been enclosed with hurdles, within which were the ponies, their 
 owners, or leaders, and the judges ; and around, in the e very-day dress 
 of working life, the men and boys of the forest. " Wild ponies and 
 wild people " was the remark of a bystander. But the roughness of the 
 forester only extends to costume ; his manners are nearly always pre- 
 possessing, and his conversation, on topics in which like that of pony- 
 
THE NEW FOREST 49 
 
 breeding, he is an authority, is as brisk and epigrammatic as that of a 
 farmer in the Yorkshire dales. Smart people in breeches and gaiters, old 
 foresters with faces rugged as their oaks, short black-eyed " gippos " pry- 
 ing and peeping between the broad shoulders of the native race, and all 
 the school children of Lyndhurst, were grouped round the ring. Within 
 it, the ponies were being led round in procession before the judges, who, 
 notebook in hand, were marking the merits and defects of each. A curly- 
 headed sweep headed the troop, carrying, instead of a whip, his soot-brush, 
 with which he occasionally whacked his handsome rough pony, a piece 
 of "effect," which had evidently been carefully thought out beforehand. 
 Most of their ponies had spent the whole of the last trying season in the 
 forest, and showed evident signs of the privations they had undergone. 
 Many had their rough coats still almost unshed. This produces a curious 
 effect, for though the forest ponies are of all known colours, the masses 
 of unkempt, shaggy winter coat, which cling to them, are of colours quite 
 unknown to the eye which only sees groomed horses, or those which have 
 been out at grass for a few months in a meadow. All sorts of shades of 
 soot-colour, sand-colour, dusty brown, smoky gray, lie in rags and tatters 
 on their flanks, colours which alter again when, as in the present case, the 
 mop-like mass is drenched with wet, or drying in the sun. Yet the 
 quality of the race shows in the fine head, and large eye, and above all, 
 when they begin to move. Unshod, and untrained, they step with all the 
 careless freedom of a race-horse, giving that curious impression of moving 
 in detail, which the shuffling jog of a coarse bred pony never creates. 
 The contrast between the animals towed in by halters, with the mud of 
 the bog still clinging to their flanks, and their civilised relations " in 
 service," is perhaps the most striking feature of the show. But the con- 
 dition in which the true forest pony appears after his winter in the open, 
 is an excellent guide to the size, points and quality necessary for combining 
 the maximum of speed and strength, with the power to endure the hard 
 life in which they are born and bred ; and the judges seem to grasp the 
 "true inwardness" of each pony's merits through any depth of matted 
 hair and mud, and in spite of any want of flesh between hide and bones. 
 The privations of the last season fell heavily on all grazing stock, 
 whether semi-wild, or kept upon the farms. Yet it was remarked that 
 ponies left to run wild in the forest did better during the long drought 
 
 D 
 
so THE NEW FOREST 
 
 than those which were " taken up " and put nito pastures on inclosed 
 land. They got into the recesses of the bogs and swamps, and there 
 found more food and better, than was available on the burnt-up meadows 
 of the farms. These ponies must in fact be judged in the first place from 
 their power to exist as wild animals : the other qualities follow. 
 
 The old saying that "a good horse is never a bad colour," seems 
 true of these " Foresters." In the endless circle moving round the ring, 
 there was as much difference in the colour of the animals as in the 
 appearance of the men and boys who led, hauled, or: pushed them round. 
 On the whole blacks and roans seemed the most numerous. Of seventy 
 animals in the ring at one time, thirty were either roans, grays or blacks. 
 As for the two-year-olds, wild little fellows fresh from the forest, awkward, 
 reluctant, shaggy, and " pixie-ridden " to the last degree, their colours 
 were so obscured by long hair and wet, that blacks, browns, and bays 
 seemed all shrouded in a dingy earth colour. But all walked with freedom 
 and grace, and most would probably have fetched from £j to ^12 as 
 they stood. It is said that the yearlings if removed to the good pastures 
 of Sussex, Dorset, or Somerset, will grow a hand taller than their dams. 
 
 It must not be supposed, from the rough and poor condition of these 
 creatures when seen in April, after exposure to the long hard winter, that 
 their life is uniformly one of privation and hardship. The health and 
 freedom which they enjoy together make them on the whole a very happy 
 and contented race. During the summer each sire collects his little troop 
 of mares, and so far as possible keeps them from the approach of any 
 rival. In the spring when the foals are born, there are {tvv prettier sights 
 than the little mares and their young, which they then bring into the 
 most sheltered and beautiful lawns near that part of the forest which they 
 haunt. Later in the year, when the sun is hot and the midge and forest 
 fly — perhaps the greatest pest to horses which exists in England, begin to 
 worry them in the thick cover and low ground, ponies and cattle alike 
 leave the low ground at about 9 a.m., and until the afternoon frequent 
 the "shades" or open ground where they stand close together half 
 asleep, swishing off the flies with their long tails. The accurate observer, 
 whose work has been quoted previously, thinks that these shades are 
 chosen according to the prevailing wind, " sometimes being chosen in the 
 full sun, where the summer breeze is better felt than in the surrounding 
 
THE NEW FOREST 51 
 
 bottoms ; at other times they will stand in a favourite part of some 
 forest stream, or in a drift away over the railway. Blackdown is a 
 favourite shade, being a ridge surrounded by bottoms, where there is 
 plenty of good feed in the driest summers, with abundance of food and 
 water. This district is perhaps the most favoured of any, being haunted 
 by over 600 ponies and cattle, or more than one-tenth of the whole stock 
 run in the forest." This was the district which it was proposed to take 
 as a military rifle range, a proposal which was successfully resisted largely 
 on the ground that the ponies would thus lose their favourite summer 
 haunt. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NORTHERN FOREST 
 
 Stony Cross — Riifus Stone and the Rufus Legend — A brief for the prosecution of Sir Walter 
 Tyrrell — The viezu from Stony-Cross Plain — Bramshazv Wood—Malwood — Minstead 
 and its park. 
 
 The great ridge of Stony-Cross Plain divides the northern from the 
 
 central forest. Along it runs the ancient road from Winchester to 
 
 Ringwood, and thence to the port of Poole. From its summit the 
 
 whole of the forest, north, south, and east, is seen in endless waves of 
 
 woods ; and in the deep glen below its eastern shoulder is the spot where 
 
 Rufus was killed by the arrow of Sir Walter Tyrrell on the evening of 
 
 the second of August, a.d. iioo. In the monkish stories the death of 
 
 Rufus became a text, not for the vengeance which comes on the despoiler 
 
 of the poor, as in the case of the death of the Conqueror's other 
 
 children on the scene of their father's oppressions, but of the vengeance 
 
 of God upon the robber of the Church. The fate of the brutal scoffer 
 
 who mocked at the holy saints, who kept abbeys without their abbots, 
 
 sees without their bishops, and the very throne of Canterbury itself 
 
 vacant for three years while he fattened on the incomes of the servants 
 
 of God, is the theme of ecclesiastical story. It was almost inevitable that 
 
 this colour should be put on the sudden death of the spoiler by zealous 
 
 Churchmen. Those who see in the denunciations of the Church, and 
 
 in the prophecies of an impending requital which were in circulation 
 
 up to the day of Rufus's death, a motive, which alters the part of 
 
 Tyrrell from the unconscious instrument to the secret emissary of 
 
 vengeance, will find some curious circumstantial evidence in an examina- 
 
THE NEW FOREST 53 
 
 tion of the spot in which the king's body was found, assuming that 
 that now marked as the place where Rufus fell is rightly identified. 
 There is good reason for thinking that in spite of the lapse of time, 
 tradition in this respect is right. The place is close to Mai wood, where 
 the king was lodging the night before, and had dined and drunk on the 
 very day of his death. 
 
 Malwood has for centuries, probably from the days of Rufus, been 
 the residence of men whose business has been to know and visit every part 
 of the forest in that particular "walk." Those in the house at the time 
 of the king's death must have had knowledge of the spot where the 
 body was found. Even if Purkiss, the charcoal-burner, who drove it in 
 his cart to Winchester, did not mention to the other foresters the scene 
 of so dreadful a discovery, it is almost certain that after the dispersion of 
 the party at the lodge, the flight of Tyrrell, and the desperate ride of 
 Henry to Winchester, in order to seize the succession to the Crown with 
 the blessings of the Church, which had banned his brother, the domestics 
 must have stolen down the hill to look at the body where it lay. The 
 death of princes, even if not followed by the appearance of the caladrus, 
 the ill-omened bird, which, according to the monkish bestiaries, only 
 appeared on earth to bring news of the death of kings, must always be 
 a topic of awe and curiosity to those near the scene, even if fear closes 
 their mouths and prevents them from paying due reverence to the body. 
 The murder of Absalom the beautiful in the wood of Ephraim was 
 known to more than the " captains of the host," though they dissembled 
 all knowledge of the deed. The descendants of the charcoal-burner, 
 who carried the body to Winchester, enjoyed for centuries the rights given 
 them as a reward, among others tbat of taking all such wood as they 
 could gather " by hook or by crook," dead branches, that is, which have 
 not yet fallen, but might be broken off, though not lopped by axe or 
 bill. Thus the evidence as to the exact place of the king's death does 
 not depend on history, or upon general tradition. It is fixed by a 
 concurrent and very coherent though independent set of circumstances. 
 In the first place by the fact which we have glanced at, that by the fixed 
 and unchanging order of the forest there have lived in continued succes- 
 sion, within ten minutes' ride of the place, persons employed for eight 
 hundred years to traverse daily that particular part of the forest, Malwood 
 
54 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 Walk, in the exercise of the same duty, the supervision of the deer and 
 the wood, men to whom by the very nature of their business every tree, 
 rivulet, and pool is a familiar object, frequently associated with some 
 fact, far less important, such as the death of an eagle, or the leap of a 
 deer, which is a part of the ordinary knowledge of the wood transmitted 
 from one generation of foresters to the next. Secondly, the spot ori- 
 ginally marked by an oak tree, was again marked by a stone, set up by 
 Lord Delaware, then warden of the forest, in 1745, which stone was 
 afterwards cased in iron in 1841. If the tree which in 1745 was in such 
 a state of decay that its place was taken by the stone, was the same which 
 was standing at the time of Rufus's death, it must have been more than 
 650 years old at the time of its total disappearance — not an impossible age 
 by any means, for the fragment in Brockenhurst churchyard probably 
 stood there quite as early, and Gilpin speaks of " a few venerable oaks in 
 the New Forest that chronicle upon their furrowed trunks ages before the 
 Conquest." But the tree may have been a shoot, or sapling or seedling, 
 of the original oak, and still have identified the spot, just as the present 
 " Cadenham oak," which buds at Christmas, marks the site of the 
 old tree. 
 
 Taking these considerations as adequate to maintain the truth of 
 tradition as to the exact spot at which the king died, the inferences from 
 an examination of the ground are as follows. The king was shot, not in 
 the wood, but at the very edge, almost at the last tree. Immediately 
 west of " Rufus Stone " the good soil stops, and a very poor, steep, 
 marshy, slope begins, which runs right up to the top of the hill by Stony 
 Cross. Wood does not grow on it now, and never could have grown, 
 for the nature of the soil has not changed, and remains in the 
 same condition for the growth or non-growth of timber, as in the 
 days of the Conquest. Again, the legend says that the king was 
 looking after a wounded deer, " shading his eyes with his hand." 
 Now he would not have needed to shade his eyes had he been in the 
 thick forest, though as the deer would naturally run out of the wood 
 across the open, and the sun was in the west, for it was late on an 
 August day, the account exactly fits the supposition that William was 
 standing where he is said to have stood and gazing after the wounded 
 deer, as it ran out across the Stony-Cross Common, when he received 
 
~^ 
 
 
THE NEW FOREST 55 
 
 the fatal arrow, William, then, was in the open, or on the very edge of 
 the wood. That he should have been shot by accident in such a place, 
 with a weapon like a bow, seems most improbable. Moreover it is 
 likely that both he and Tyrrell were waiting for deer to be driven to 
 them. The place is still a natural pass for deer, and the " Rufus " Stone 
 stands on the neck of a little bluff, on either side of which driven deer 
 would naturally pass on their way up the valley, and up which they do 
 pass now when hunted. Supposing Rufus to have turned and shot one, 
 his back or side would be presented to the man who was guarding the 
 other pass below the knoll. On the other hand it was a place which 
 gave admirable opportunities for the escape of an assassin. Just above, 
 or over Stony-Cross Plain ran the sound road, along the high open 
 ridges, straight across the north of the forest, not to Lymington or 
 Beaulieu, which would probably be ports friendly to the king whose 
 property the forest was, but across the Avon, out of the reach of 
 summary forest law, down to Poole, whence ships were constantly 
 passing over the Channel for Normandy. The course which Tyrrell is 
 said to have taken fits exactly with the theory that he committed the 
 murder here, with the intention of instant flight by this convenient 
 road. The story runs that he rode to the Avon at the spot still called 
 Tyrrell's Ford, and, there after forcing the smith to shoe his horse 
 with the shoes reversed, killed the man, that he might not betray him. 
 A yearly fine paid by the owners of the house where he crossed at what is 
 still called Tyrrell's ford, is said to record the memory of the passage. 
 Whether this legend be true in detail or not, it seems agreed that Tyrrell 
 did escape from Poole to Normandy, and that there, after giving to Abbot 
 Suger his account of the king's death in which he claimed that it was 
 accidental, took the unusual step — for a man with a guiltless conscience 
 — of making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in performing which he died. 
 
 The view from the height of Stony Cross Plain, which was the scene 
 of Tyrrell's Ride, gives perhaps the best idea of the extent of the forest 
 and its relation to the splendid country which surrounds it. Along the 
 back of the ridge, on the high firm ground, the ancient road runs from 
 Cadenham, where it is joined by the main roads from Winchester and 
 Southampton, straight across the forest, to Ringwood. This northern 
 ridge is almost the highest land in the forest. Beyond it, far to the 
 
S6 THE NEPF FOREST 
 
 south, the whole district falls away to the Solent, beyond which the hills 
 of the Isle of Wight are distinctly seen. This " prospect " of the forest 
 has nothing of the chess-board appearance, usual in extensive views in 
 southern England. Right away to the sea-shore the eye sees nothing but 
 woods, commons, and heaths, not in squares and patches, but in a succes- 
 sion of long ridges which seem to run out from right to left from a 
 shoulder of higher land to the west. Lyndhurst spire shoots up in the 
 centre, Minstead, Bolderwood, Rhinefield, Wilverly, and Christchurch 
 bound it on the west. Eastward, the eye ranges across Southampton 
 Water to the long line of woods, and faintly seen white houses near 
 Netley Abbey, and the old fortress of Calshot Castle, Thus the whole 
 southern forest is within sight, with its natural and ancient boundaries of 
 the Avon Valley, Southampton Water, and the Solent. 
 
 Looking backwards, north and north-east, the Wiltshire Downs are 
 seen, and to the right the chalk hills beyond Romsey, abutting on 
 Winchester. The two great cities of Wessex, Winchester and Salisbury, 
 here have joint claims upon the forest. Timber for the roofing of Salis- 
 bury was cut in Bramshaw Wood, where it abuts on Wiltshire, and 
 adjacent are the lands of the wardens of Winchester College. Days 
 might be spent in gazing on this magnificent panorama, without exhaust- 
 ing its beauties. Across the valley to the north, at the deepest point of 
 which Rufus met his death, the beautiful beech woods of Eyeworth Walk 
 and Bramble Hill are spread on the slope like curly fleeces. As the day 
 goes on, the cattle come trooping up from the woods to seek relief from 
 the forest flies on the open '-shade" in front of the inn, and the 
 air is resonant with the music of their bells. 
 
 Malwood, where stood the house in which Rufus lay the night before 
 his death, and where till the present generation, the keeper of Malwood 
 Walk had his lodge, is the eastern buttress of this high Stony-Cross 
 Ridge. Sir William Vernon Harcourt's beautiful house now stands 
 on the site ; long, low, timbered and gabled, it is perhaps the most pleas- 
 ing of the many new mansions which now stand on sites leased from the 
 Crown on the ground once occupied by the old lodges. Between 
 Malwood and Lyndhurst lies the beautiful village and park of Minstead. 
 It is difficult to account for the change which the barrier of a paling 
 makes in the general aspect of trees and herbage within and without. 
 
THE NEW FOREST 57 
 
 The park was clearly taken from the forest, yet every blade of grass 
 seems different, and every tree has a "domesticated" look. Probably 
 this is due to the work of the scythe on the one, and of the inevitable 
 tendency to improve on nature in the other. Outside, in the forest, the 
 grass has never been mown, and constantly browsed and trampled by 
 cattle. The trees have never been lopped, except as the wind tore off 
 the rotten branches. Thus the grass of the forest is like a bowling alley 
 set with flowers, the grass of the park, the common and cultivated 
 verdure of the hayfield. The positive contribution of the park to the 
 forest landscape is in the number of trees of species not indigenous to the 
 forest, which are properly planted round great houses. Thus at Minstead 
 Manor the long drive is fringed by masses of rhododendron twenty feet 
 high. Their blaze of red flower on the dark-green background of 
 shining leafage, the yellow clusters of azalea, and the few gigantic 
 araucarias, which rise from the mass below without a single dead branch, 
 make a beautiful incident in the midst of the natural forest. The fine 
 mansion, and ancient and picturesque stables and ofiices, the kennels and 
 gardens bowered in this mass of exotic shrubbery, with all the evidences 
 of ancient and distinguished inhabitation suggest a train of thought 
 different from, but not out of harmony with, that which arises in the 
 contemplation of the natural woods. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SOUTHERN FOREST AND BEAULIEU 
 
 BeauUeu Abbey and its history — The ruins at St. Leonard's — 77v Solent shore — Cobbetfs 
 admiration of the view — Sowley Pond — Wild-fowl — The Beaulieu river and Buckler'' s 
 Hard — Nelson's flagship built in the forest^Commoners and squatters — Their houses at 
 Hill Top — Forest rights — Pigs and pannage — Szvineherds — Rights of fuel — Future of 
 the forest. 
 
 In the purview of the forest the great and ancient domain of 
 Beaulieu claims separate and unique consideration. Geographically it is 
 the riverine and maritime district of the forest, in which the Abbey of 
 Beaulieu itself, at the head of its tidal river, marks the point of connec- 
 tion, between the inland portions and the beautiful Solent shore. It was 
 part of the original forest of William the Conqueror, and might have 
 remained like the rest of the great hunting-ground, a wild and sparsely 
 populated region, whose main interest to the modern world is that the 
 changes, which make history, have been so little felt that in its present 
 condition it hardly invites historical inquiry, because it presents itself 
 almost unchanged by centuries, as a fossil fact. 
 
 The act of King John in granting this magnificent domain for the 
 support of an abbey of Cistercians, withdrew it at once and for ever from 
 the deadening, though conservative, influence of the forest law, and from 
 that moment Beaulieu has a separate and dignified history, the human 
 interest of which exceeds that of the forest itself. The resources and 
 splendour of this domain are such that it has, from the appointment of 
 its first abbot until the present time, maintained its position as an 
 imperium in imperio through all the tumults of history. It is of vast 
 extent, yet the boundaries of the Manor Bank have never been broken or 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 59 
 
 encroached upon. Backed by the forest and bounded by the sea, fertile 
 in corn, in wine — the remains of its terraced vineyards and the house of 
 the winepress still survive — and inclosing nearly the whole of a splendid 
 tidal river, it could exist as an independent whole, alike in beauty, 
 position, and natural resources. Whether in mortmain — the "dead 
 hand " of the Church — or in private possession, its resources have been 
 consecutively in the power of a single owner, who has enjoyed a prestige 
 
 
 Jllejcr/ljistecL. 
 
 Bcdulieu Abbey. 
 
 from its possession such as is not conferred by any domain of similar 
 extent. The privileges granted to the abbots by King John, and con- 
 firmed by charter after charter of his successors, were at least equal to 
 those enjoyed by the kings themselves, when the manor was part of their 
 forest. The abbey enjoyed every ordinary forest right, and some which 
 were exceptional ; the abbots might hunt within the manor and follow 
 their game into the forest a bowshot beyond its boundaries ; their hounds 
 were excepted from the provisions as to mutilation if found in the forest, 
 and to this day the manor shares with only one other, that of Brocken- 
 
6o THE NEW FOREST 
 
 hurst, the privilege of feeding sheep in the forest. The Prince Abbots of 
 Beaulieu sat among the Lords spiritual in Parliament for 200 years, and 
 after the confiscation of their estates the prestige of the possession of the 
 manor seems never to have failed to confer upon its owners the dignity of a 
 peerage, or a step in rank on those who already enjoyed it. In 1538 Sir 
 Thomas Wriothesley, Lord High Chancellor, bought the entire manor, 
 then worth ^^428 6s. 8d. a year, making, according to Cobbett's estimate, 
 /^8,500 of our money, for ^2,000. He was created Earl of Southampton. 
 In the reign of William III. Ralph, Lord Montagu, married the heiress of 
 the Earl of Southamption, and was created Duke of Montagu. Edward 
 Hussey, who married one of the co-heiresses of John Duke of Montagu, 
 was created an earl — Earl of Beaulieu. At this time the manor was for 
 one life divided, for the other daughter of John Duke of Montagu 
 married the Duke George her cousin. She left a daughter, and the 
 Earl of Beaulieu dying without children, the estate passed to this 
 daughter, who married the Duke of Buccleuch. The great-grandson of 
 that Duke, Lord Henry Scott, became possessor of Beaulieu, and was 
 created Baron Montagu in 1887. Thus the possession of Beaulieu seems 
 to carry with it a patent of nobility as well as the enjoyment of one of 
 the most beautiful estates in England. 
 
 The history of the abbey is perhaps as good an example as can be 
 found of the magnificence, method, and good sense with which these great 
 foundations were projected, developed, and maintained. The story which 
 attributes the original grant to a fit of superstitious remorse, may or 
 may not be founded on fact ; if it is, the subsequent record, of the use 
 made of the gift is in strange contrast to its inception. The tale is that 
 the king summoned the abbots of the white-robed Cistercians to meet 
 him at Lincoln, and that enraged at their hostility to himself, he ordered 
 them to be trampled to death by wild horses. His soldiers refused to 
 become executioners, and the abbots fied. Next morning the king 
 confided to his confessor that he had dreamt during the night that he had 
 been brought up for judgment before St. Peter, who had handed him 
 over to the abbots to be beaten, and that he was still aching from the 
 blows. The confessor induced him to apologise to the abbots, and to 
 make reparation by founding an abbey of Cistercians at Beaulieu. 
 
 There is no need of this legend to account for John's anxiety to have 
 
rHE NEW FOREST 6i 
 
 at least one body of powerful and well-affected ecclesiastics on his side. 
 From the time of this great gift the Cistercians remained loyal to the 
 king, even against the orders of the Pope himself ; and even during the 
 interdict, when the whole realm lay under the Papal ban, as the result 
 of John's quarrel with Rome, these English Cistercians celebrated 
 Divine service at the command of their abbots, for which they were 
 excommunicated by Innocent III, The king restored to them their 
 lands which had been seized on account of the interdict, and at the fourth 
 Lateran council held at Rome in the year 121 5, at which were present 312 
 bishops, and more than 200 abbots and priors, the abbot of Beaulieu, 
 on behalf of King John, impeached Archbishop Langton of high treason 
 for his share in the direction of the barons' revolt. The founding of 
 Beaulieu was a piece of policy on the part of the king, the reason for 
 which is sufficiently clear by its results. But the magnificence of its 
 development was partly due to fortune. The piety of John's son, 
 Henry III., enriched it for conscience' sake ; one of his numerous grants 
 was that of the profits of three years from his stud of horses in the forest, 
 to pay for masses for his father's soul. In his reign the abbey church 
 was completed, and the greater part of the buildings in the precinct were 
 either projected or begun. The church was as large as that of Romsey ; 
 but though the lines of its foundations have been traced, and are kept 
 in evidence with the same care which is bestowed on the preservation of 
 each and every portion of the ruins, the building itself has disappeared. 
 It is hard to conceive a greater shock to religious sentiment than the 
 ruthless destruction of this abbey church, while all that was useful for 
 secular purposes was retained ; the barns and cellars kept for the storage 
 of the wealth which the land still yielded to its new owner, the stones of 
 the house of God taken to build Hurst Castle, and the lead of its 
 roof to cover the towers of the sister fortress at Calshot, 
 
 The buildings which remain are still among the most beautiful ruins 
 of the south, and serve to show the scale on which the abbey was 
 conceived; and the wisdom which dictated the choice of its site. They 
 lie on a gently sloping meadow, in which the great wall of the precinct 
 stands here and there in gray masses, marking the lines of an inclosure a 
 mile and a quarter round. The mass of the buildings, the church, the 
 cloisters, the abbot's house, the guest house, and last but not least, the 
 
62 
 
 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 means and appliances which converted into wealth the commodities which 
 fed the colony, stood close to the very head of the tidal river. There 
 were the mill, the storehouses, and a quay, to which the ships from 
 France, Spain and the Hanse towns came as the natural port of what was 
 at once an outlet for the trade of the forest, and the seat of a great 
 industrial community. Part of this quay is submerged; but part remains 
 
 covered with grass and flowers; and 
 this quiet, butterfly-haunted spot is 
 still called Cheapside. Opposite and 
 abutting on this quay are the ruins 
 of the abbey, and the beautiful 
 "Palace House," the centre of which 
 is the lofty " Gate House " of the 
 abbey, while round it the buildings 
 of a modern mansion are grouped 
 with such skill that the house forms 
 a whole as completely adapted to 
 its setting and surroundings as the 
 abbey itself. Within the great wall 
 of the precinct are the refectory, 
 now converted into the parish 
 church, and the remains of the ex- 
 quisite cloister court, of the chapter 
 house, and of a huge chamber, still 
 in good repair, in which the guests 
 of the abbey were housed. This 
 last is a good example of the 
 simple, large-minded way in which 
 the monks set to work to build for 
 ordinary purposes. They built two 
 gable ends as wide as they had space for, or where space was no object, 
 as wide as the forest oaks would give them cross-beams for their roof. 
 Then they joined their ends by straight thick walls pierced with windows, 
 thick and massive with no need for buttresses or contrivances to eke 
 out bad workmanship or save expense. There are several remains of 
 their great storehouses, a wine-store, and a gable sixty feet wide at the 
 
 
 m> 
 
 
 ■w'l-. «& 
 
 ) 
 
 ^''^iij 
 
 
 G(Jte House, Beaulieu. 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 ^3 
 
 abbey, and at St. Leonard's, a branch colony nearer to the Solent is 
 probably the largest building of its kind existing. In the ruins of the 
 abbey there are enough relics of interest to give material for days of 
 minute inquiry. 
 
 It is hard to understand why Cobbett, whose eye for scenery, and 
 admiration for the great religious foundations destroyed by Henry VIII. , 
 might have been expected to make him view with sympathy and apprecia- 
 tion, a scene in which two such elements of interest are combined, is 
 
 \Pk. 
 
 i^ '< * mrtimnf ' ' ^•'' '■'■'»•' iff 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 Beaulieu. 
 
 rather cold in his praises of Beaulieu. "The abbey," he writes in his 
 Ride from Lyndhurst to Godalming, "is not situated in a very fine place. 
 The situation is low ; the lands above it rather a swamp than otherwise " 
 — he must mean the lands higher up the stream, for the slopes above the 
 abbey were the ancient site of vineyards, and necessarily dry and sunny — 
 *' pretty enough altogether," he continues, "but by no means a fine 
 place." Few people will be inclined to assent to this. As a site for the 
 colony for which it was chosen Beaulieu is almost perfect. The lake 
 
64 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 above and the river below, meadows so rich that the elms grow there to 
 a size which rivals the forest oaks, the background of magnificent woods 
 which run back for a mile to the crest of the great plain of Beaulieu 
 Heath which lies above, give an air of propriety and richness to the 
 surroundings of the abbey for which it would be difficult to find a 
 parallel elsewhere. The view of the whole, looking up the river, the 
 natural approach at a time when the forest was a trackless half-desert 
 region, towards the abbey, the bridge, and the little cluster of houses and 
 the mill which overhung the dark pool below the river, made it as fine a 
 place to look at^ which we take to be the meaning of Beaulieu, as could 
 be desired, and one of the most beautiful heads of an estuary which can 
 be found in England.^ Cobbett, however, had seen another part of the 
 ancient domain of the abbey before spending any time at Beaulieu itself, 
 a place which he declared to have impressed him far more favourably. 
 Neither Cobbett's conclusions, nor, so far as modern authority goes, his 
 archaeology, seems quite consonant with facts. But the accident which 
 took him past Beaulieu to the ruins at " St. Leonard's," led incidentally to 
 a description of that unrivalled view from the maritime side of the 
 monks' domain, which is well worth quoting. " Happening to meet a 
 man before I got into the village, I, pointing with my whip across 
 towards the abbey said to the man, ' I suppose there is a bridge down 
 here to get across to the abbey.' ' That's not the abbey, sir,' says he. 
 *The abbey is about four miles further on.' Having chapter and verse 
 for it I pushed on towards farmer John Biel's. When I got there I 
 really thought at first that this must have been the site of the abbey of 
 Beaulieu ; because the name meaning fine place^ this was a thousand times 
 finer place than that where the abbey, as I afterwards found, really stood. 
 After looking about for some time, I was satisfied that it had not been 
 an abbey ; but the place is one of the finest that ever was seen in this 
 world. It stands at about half-a-mile distance from the water's edge at 
 high-water mark, and at about the middle of the space along the coast 
 from Calshot Castle to Lymington Haven. To the right you see Hurst 
 Castle and that narrow passage called the Needles : and to the left you see 
 Spithead, and all the ships that are sailing or lie anywhere opposite 
 
 ^ A good inn, the Montagu Arms, with modern comfort and old prices, must be 
 counted among the attractions of Beaulieu. 
 
tHE NEW FOREST 
 
 65 
 
 Portsmouth. The Isle of Wight is right before you, and you have in 
 view at one and the same time, the towns of Yarmouth, Newtown, Cowes, 
 and Newport, with all the beautiful fields of the island, lying upon the 
 side of a great bank before and going up the ridge of hills in the middle 
 of the island. 
 
 " The ruins consist of part of the walls of a building about 200 feet 
 long and 40 wide. It has been turned into a barn, in part, and the rest 
 
 U w, 
 
 '>r'^vVN : K,,\ 1 
 
 / / 
 
 
 ''//■; 
 
 
 
 '. o^Z- 
 
 ^\ 
 
 JW^stei' _ , / 
 
 
 
 V I 
 
 Interior of Beaulieu Church. 
 
 \ \ 
 
 into cattle-sheds. But there is another ruin, which was a church or 
 chapel, and stands very near to the farm-house. This little church or 
 chapel appears to have been a very beautiful building, A part only of 
 its walls are standing, but you see, by what remains of the arches, that 
 it was finished in a manner the most elegant and expensive of the day 
 in which it was built. Part of the outside of the building is now sur- 
 rounded by the farmer's garden. The interior is partly a pig-stye, 
 partly a goose-pen." 
 
 E 
 
66 THE NEJV FOREST 
 
 Cobbett declared these ruins to have been once the hospital of Knights 
 of St. John of Jerusalem. Modern authorities say that it was a branch 
 establishment of the Beaulieu monks, containing their enormous granary, 
 a chapel, and the lodging for the workers of iron at Sowley, and of the 
 salt-pits on the shore. Everything remains as it was in Cobbett's time 
 except that the last of the race of John Biel has departed from the farm. 
 But the beautiful little chapel is no longer a goose-pen, but covered, floor, 
 walls, and windows, with a wonderful growth of plants and weeds. It 
 abuts on the garden of the farm, a handsome solid old house with low 
 comfortable rooms and a row of dormer windows in the roof. Both 
 gables of the chapel stand, and the remains of rich niches and carved 
 work peep out from the ivy and trailing plants. Flowers blossom all 
 over these walls, roses, cranesbill, yellow barberry in masses, bramble- 
 blossoms, odd garden herbs, fennel and rue, yellow mustard, honesty, 
 and beds of " burrs " and pink nettle. It is a perfect sun-trap, and the 
 black ivy-berries are as big as currants and in bunches so heavy they 
 hang their heads. But the remains of the enormous barn are the great 
 sight of the place. It is far larger than Cobbett says. The present 
 writer makes it 80 paces long and 25 wide. The gable ends are colossal, 
 built up without window or buttress. Apparently the task of providing 
 a new roof to cover this huge and high-pitched span was beyond the 
 powers of later generations, so the front wall was moved back many paces 
 and a narrower and meaner building fitted within the old one. The 
 stock-doves fly out of the crevices in these huge gables as if out of a 
 clifi\ Every buttress on the side walls is " trimmed " with golden fringes 
 of hard fern, and the ivy stems on the eastern end resemble the knots in 
 ship's cables. 
 
 All the way down through the manor towards the south the ground 
 falls gradually lower and lower, divided pretty equally between woods 
 and arable land, with fine farm-houses, the view of the blue Solent 
 opens out in the way Cobbett describes. Bei/e Vue rather than 
 Beaulieu would be an appropriate name, the former being proper 
 rather to the place you look from than the place you look at. The 
 coast of the forest is here so sheltered by the screen of the Isle 
 of Wight hills that it is not till within half a mile of the shore, beyond 
 the ruins at St. Leonard's, that the tops of the oaks begin to incline in 
 
THE NEIV FOREST 67 
 
 one direction, the certain sign of sea breezes. The cultivated fields run 
 down almost to the beach, and partridges may be seen feeding in the 
 growing corn within a stone's throw of the breakers. Seen across the 
 narrow waters, the line of the island stretches back eastward beyond the 
 line of sight, and the visitor might imagine himself on the shores of the 
 Hellespont, separated only from another continent by the narrow strip of 
 dissociable ocean, guarded like the entrance to the Propontis by castles 
 and fortresses, where the parapets and battlements of Hurst break the 
 
 
 T/:e Edge of the Forest near L'^mington. 
 
 line of sky, and the series of batteries old and new line the opposite 
 coast with signs and tokens that here also are set the gates of empire. 
 The long low sweep of shore which runs from the sandspit at the mouth 
 of the Beaulieu river to the point at which it begins to be silted up by 
 the mud deposits of the Lymington river, is fronted by shingle, and 
 crossed by innumerable groins of oak trunks driven deep into the ground. 
 Between these the shore slopes up to a green bank, which makes a 
 beautiful turf drive within a few yards of the sea, backed by hedges as 
 green and luxuriant as any on the manor, and fields of growing crops. 
 It is not difficult to picture the "joy in harvest " of those whose lot it is 
 
 E 2 
 
68 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 to cut and reap the corn by this lovely inland sea, where a man may 
 leave binding the sheaves, or the mowers rest at midday, and cross the 
 fence to where the waves come tumblino- in before the fresh breeze 
 blowing in from the Needles and the island fortress of Hurst. Further 
 to the south the shore rises with low cliffs, and the shrubs and flowers of 
 the mainland creep quite down among the shingle ; bramble, and haw- 
 thorn, grow among the gray and colourless plants of the seashore, and 
 among the sea-thistles and horned poppies, tiny flowers of wild rose 
 blossom, so low that their petals look like little pink shells lying 
 amongst the pebbles. 
 
 Lymington, the ancient port of the Royal Forest, as Beaulieu was of 
 the Abbey Estates, lies further west. Its long well-built street runs at 
 right angles to the head of the ancient harbour, at the top of the great 
 mud-silted lagoon which joins it to the Solent. Below the steep hill on 
 which stands the town are the old quays, building slips, and wharves, so 
 close that the masts of the vessels seem to rise among the apple-trees of 
 the gardens. In the meadows near the harbour's mouth are quaint old 
 docks and the remains of what were once elegant pavilions and boat 
 houses. But the sea trade of Lymington has passed to Southampton, 
 and its seaside visitors have deserted it for the Bournemouth sands. 
 
 The change from coast to inland scenery, which a few minutes' 
 walk may show, is among the strangest features of a visit to 
 the forest shore. A journey of a few hundred yards along the 
 channel of a little rushing stream, brings the visitor before a fine 
 inland lake, sheltered on nearly every side by woods, and with 
 deep fringes of sedge and reeds ; a perfect paradise for wild-fowl. 
 In the winter this lake is the great resort of the duck, teal, and 
 widgeon, which haunt the waters of the Solent, and come here for rest and 
 quiet during the day, or in rough inclement weather. Beaulieu is 
 almost unrivalled as a resort of wild-fowl. In hard weather wild swans 
 haunt the quiet river, and geese, widgeon, and duck of all kinds are found 
 in numbers, which recall the days of Colonel Hawker, the " father of 
 wild-fowling," whose exploits on the Solent in pursuit of his favourite 
 sport formed one of the earliest and best of British books on wild life. 
 The flamingo which was shot on the river, and is now stufi^ed at Palace 
 House, was clearly a wild bird ; its delicate white and pink feathers are 
 
^mi i'i, 
 
 ''■i'lM'll' ';'- ^ 
 
 111 M L^ 
 
 ':'i:'>' i„^Q^'^ 
 
 / n.illli^ 11, in 
 
70 
 
 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 in perfect condition, free from any break or soiling, which is the certain 
 mark of captivity in wild-fowl. Ospreys visit the river to feed on the 
 mullet, trout, and salmon peel ; and on the heaths beyond black-game 
 are still found. It is said that these are gradually decreasing all over the 
 forest, partly from the number of foxes, partly owing to the ravages of 
 the oologists. 
 
 A Creek on the Beaulieu River. 
 
 As for the Beaulieu river, there is nothing like it in England. 
 or rather like that part which begins at Beaulieu bridge, and 
 falls into the Solent nine miles below. All the waters of those 
 forest streams, those marshes, bogs, and swamps which you have 
 crossed, leaped over, or sunk into in exploring the northern forest, are 
 at last choked into a wide mere, which would be called a " broad " 
 in Norfolk, by the narrowing of the valley and some ancient engineering 
 
THE NEW FOREST 71 
 
 devices of the monks, and then, through a weir opposite the gate 
 of the Palace, the fresh water from the forest above pours into 
 the salt-water river below. Thus above the bridge are water-lilies, 
 below it seaweed ; and from that point a beautiful broad salt river, rapid 
 and sinuous, sweeps through oak woods, and meadows starred with 
 flowers like the meads above Oxford at Rosamond's Bower, yet never 
 quite foregoes that dignity which it borrows from the sea, whose 
 doubled tides advance to fill it not twice, but four times in the twenty- 
 four hours. Here then is a tidal river in which " low water " is but 
 only a change for an hour or two in the landscape, a river whose 
 bed shows only yellow gravel, or little sheets of saltings crowded by 
 feeding birds, and backed by woods, where the banks are disfigured by 
 no towing path or foul factories, and whose silent waters are broken not 
 by steam-tugs and barges, but by fleets of shining swans. Little winding 
 creeks run up into the woods, bordered by close-set rows of dark oak 
 piles, and roofed by the clustered trees, creeks in which you might expect 
 to find the "keel" of some prying Dane docked, while its blue-eyed 
 crew crept up through the woods to spy out the land, or the hidden 
 piraguas of the sea pirates who plundered Panama. Nor is this a mere 
 fanciful suggestion from the scenery. War and opportunity lead 
 to much the same results, whatever the date; and here in 1704 
 Beaulieu Palace, nine miles up an English river, was fortified by John, 
 Duke of Montagu, with a moat, walls and towers against the possible 
 attack of French privateers,^ a precaution which seems less strange 
 than it might, in the light of the plunder of the Earl of Seafield's 
 plate by Paul Jones, as to which a curious correspondence recently 
 appeared in the newspapers. 
 
 The woods which run for miles along the river banks are perhaps 
 equally ancient with the oldest in the forest — ancient that is as having 
 always been wooded ground. But their character is wholly difl^erent. 
 They are the woods of a manor, grown for profit, carefully tended, and 
 full of the close and beautiful "sous bois," or underwood, which in the 
 forest has disappeared, and left only the " haut bois," or timber trees. 
 
 1 Others account for the moat and turrets round Palace House by the taste tor 
 French architecture acquired by the duke in his residence abroad. Part ot the woods 
 were also laid out on the French system. 
 
72 
 
 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 The woods on the opposite bank have that " carded " look, Hke curly 
 hair combed, which sea-breezes give to trees as well as to sailors' locks ; 
 but except for this and the cries of the lapwings and the redshanks in 
 the rushy meadow below there is nothing in the view which opens on 
 leaving the wood to suggest that the water in front is anything but 
 an inland lake. It winds between the hills exactly like a branch of 
 Virginia Water. On the low ridge to the left is a square built village of 
 
 BeauUeu River at Buckler's Hard. 
 
 good old red brick, brown tiled houses ; not so much a village indeed as a 
 street, running at right angles to the river, and looking like a section of 
 old Portsea cut away and set down in the woods. And that is exactly 
 what it is ; a fragment of the great arsenal, left high and dry by time on 
 the shores of the Beaulieu river. Here, on the green slope where the 
 cattle feed and children play, was built of Nev/ Forest oak, Nelson's ship 
 the Agamemnon., 64, the ship which he was commanding when he lost his 
 
THE NEW FOREST 73 
 
 right eye at the siege of Calvi, the ship which carried his flag in the 
 battle of the Baltic, one of whose crew, at the battle of St. Vincent, 
 tucked under his arm the swords of the Spanish officers as if gathering 
 sticks for a faggot. Those whose boding fancy foresees a time when no 
 sign will be left of the great industries of the North but burnt-out cinder 
 heaps, should consider the history of Buckler's Hard. 
 
 In the middle of the last century, John Duke of Montagu, Lord of 
 Beaulieu, and owner of the great sugar-island of St. Vincent, and inheritor 
 of the rights of the Abbots of Beaulieu to a free harbour upon his river, 
 determined to make a seaport at Buckler's Hard. It was a far-sighted 
 scheme, in view of the American trade, which posterity has justified by the 
 creation of modern Southampton. Grants of land at a nominal rent, and 
 of timber delivered free, soon attracted shipbuilders to the spot, and in 
 September, 1743, the Surprise^ 24, the first battleship built on the river 
 was launched. From that time till the end of the great war, the work 
 grew and prospered. Frigates succeeded sloops, and battleships frigates, 
 and each vessel after it left the slips, was taken round to be fitted and 
 manned at Portsmouth. The Surprise went out to fight the French in 
 May, 1750; the Vigilant, 64, 1,374 tons, in 1774; the Hannibal, 74, 
 was launched in 18 10. The Agamemnon, after carrying Lord Nelson 
 through the battle of the Baltic, and taking her share in Trafalgar, was 
 lost in Maldonado Bay in the River Plate in 1809; the Indefatigable, 
 the Illustrious, the Swiftsure, line of battle-ships, and a whole fleet of 
 frigates were launched at Buckler's Hard during the latter years of the 
 war. Such was the skill of the builders and the resources of the place 
 that a seventy-four gun ship was not longer than thirty months upon the 
 stocks, though 2,000 oaks, 100 tons of wrought iron, and 30 tons of 
 copper, were worked into her fabric. The whole of this great industry 
 was created and directed by one man, Mr. Henry Adams, who carried it 
 on for sixty years, and lived till the age of ninety-two. His sons 
 succeeded him; and the ruin of Buckler's Hard was due, not to the failure 
 of its resources, but to the deliberate action of the Admiralty. The 
 Adamses were commissioned to build four ships at once, and for not 
 delivering them by the date agreed on, were ruined by fines and litigation 
 at the instance of the Government whom they served. Of their once 
 prosperous yard, no sign remains but the houses they built, and four 
 
74 "THE NEW FOREST 
 
 grass-grown hollows in the shore which were the slipways of the battle- 
 ships. In one of these, filled with water at high tide, lies the rotting 
 skeleton of a wooden vessel, her stem and stern posts still upright, while 
 from her back project the broken and distorted ribs, and bent bolts of 
 copper. From a tree in the garden of what once was the home of the 
 Adamses, there still waves, as if in mockery, a ragged Union Jack. 
 
 The squatters' houses which fringe the forest, are the subject of much 
 amusing legend and odd domestic history. They illustrate the unsettled 
 and lawless condition which prevailed in the district towards the end of 
 the last century, better, perhaps, than any other feature of the forest. 
 
 A favourite site for their colonies was on the fringe of some great 
 estate projecting into the Crown Forest. At Beaulieu, for instance, the 
 boundary of the property is called the " Manor Bank." South and east 
 of the Abbey it abuts on high flat open heaths ; and there the line of 
 division is a bank in the literal sense, a high rampart of earth separating 
 the cultivated land and plantations of Beaulieu from the wild and open 
 forest. To this bank, the cottages of the commoners and squatters cling 
 like swallows' nests to the eaves. It is said that in the old days of en- 
 croachments, custom ruled, that if a house were once built, roofed^ and 
 a fire lit within, it was not in the power of the Crown to pull it down. 
 Occupation, and not architecture, was the object of the squatters, and 
 the game of house-building in the forest was soon played with a skill 
 born of long practice, which baffled the spasmodic fits of energy on the 
 part of the authorities. It reached such a stage of perfection that the art 
 of building, roofing, putting in a chimney, and lighting a fire within the 
 space of a single winter's night was at last attained ; and the curl of smoke 
 rising defiantly in the gray of a December morning was the signal that 
 the squatter had triumphed, and that henceforth he was irremovable. 
 Some of these little cabins are still used, though more commodious 
 dwellings have been added to them. Others stand, or are tumbling 
 down, in the gardens of later buildings. Fifty years of settled and 
 prosperous occupation have not given them the complacency of the 
 humdrum cottage. They never quite lose the hasty, half-defiant look 
 which is their birthmark, though their present owners enjoy a degree of 
 security, independence, and general goodwill, which their honourable and 
 industrious lives fully justify. The ancient contrast of the life within 
 
THE NEW FOREST 75 
 
 and without the " pale," is nowhere more picturesquely suggested than 
 by the line of old cottages at " Hill Top," at the edge of Beaulieu 
 Heath. The cottages are all set in narrow strips of garden, won from 
 the heath. These bits of ground are now fertile and well cultivated. 
 The houses themselves present an odd contrast of original poverty and 
 present comfort. In structure they are, for the most part, of the 
 roughest, and by no means most durable order. Some are of one story, 
 some of two. The walls of all, or nearly all, are of yellow clay, some- 
 thing like the " cob " or " clay-lump " cottages and barns of South 
 Devon. The roofs are straw-thatch, though in some this has been 
 replaced by slate. The material of the walls seems hardly adequate to 
 support two stories, for in many the wall bends inwards, and the lattice 
 windows, and wooden frames seem to have taken kindly to the curvature. 
 In some of the gardens the original house, which gave the " claim " to 
 the land, still remains, a kind of "doll's house," which was enough to 
 support the legal fiction of occupation. Most of the cottages have little 
 pony-stables, piggeries, and wood-stacks attached, and though the exterior 
 is humble and sometimes dilapidated, a glance at the interior gives every 
 evidence of comfort and good living. The rooms are well and sub- 
 stantially furnished, with abundance of brightly kept household gear. 
 There are flowers in the windows, pretty curtains and blinds, and the 
 small and pleasing evidences of a mind so far free from the hardships of 
 life as to find time for the enjoyment of its minor amenities. Above all 
 the children are healthy, well dressed, and in many cases of singular 
 beauty. There is one type which seems common in these cottages on 
 the high uplands of the forest, gray eyes with dark lashes, small regular 
 features, and a complexion of the most delicate pink and white, not the 
 common cherrv-cheeked complexion of rustic good looks, but of a far 
 purer and more refined order, which seems as characteristic of the 
 children of the forest as their quiet and reserved demeanour. 
 
 Men living the life of these commoners, attract an amount of 
 interest and sympathy which must have its root in an appeal to some 
 widely diffused and common sentiment. They are not a numerous class, 
 the owners of from one to twenty acres being about 580. But these only 
 hold -^Lth part of the land entitled to rights of common, which are always 
 attached to some particular house or piece of land. These are let by the 
 
76 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 great proprietors to tenants who pay rent both for houses, land and forest 
 rights, and make the same use of them as is done by the small freeholders. 
 Both are an extremely honest, industrious and independent class of men, 
 among whom theft is unknown, and drunkenness and improvidence 
 extremely rare. 
 
 The existence of both is dependent upon the forest rights which they 
 enjoy, the nature of which is better ascertained than their origin. In the 
 case of many holdings the title is extremely ancient, in others a claim to 
 ownership made by a squatter has probably been followed by a concession of 
 common rights. Their present extent is very carefully defined. The 
 first and most important is the right of pasture for all kinds of cattle but 
 goats and sheep, except in the case of the owners of the Manors of 
 Beaulieu and Brockenhurst. 5,469 cattle were turned out in the forest 
 by commoners in the year 1892. The second is the " common of mast," 
 or right of feeding hogs, otherwise called " pannage " ; and this is so 
 valuable that in a good acorn year each pig run in the torest is said to 
 increase ten shillings in value, without cost to the owner. 
 
 "Pannage time" lasts, properly speaking, from September 25th 
 to November 22nd ; but though the Crown has the right to impound 
 pigs found in the forest at other times, this rule is seldom enforced. 
 When there are no nuts and acorns. New Forest pigs graze almost like 
 cattle, cropping the grass with their teeth. Formerly they must have 
 been the most characteristic animal of the forest, after the deer. Cobbett, 
 on his ride to Beaulieu from Lyndhurst, says: " Of pigs this day we saw 
 many, many thousand. I should think we saw at least a hundred hogs to 
 one deer. I stopped at one time and counted the hogs and pigs just round 
 me, and they amounted to 140, all within fifty or sixty yards of my 
 horse," 
 
 The gathering of the pigs in " pannage time " was until recently one 
 of the most complete survivals of Saxon days known in this country. 
 The swineherd received from each commoner the pigs he wished fatted, 
 with a small payment for each animal, A convenient place had been 
 previously selected for a rough sty, where there was plenty of beech-mast, 
 acorns, and water, " In Bolderwood Walk," says Mr, Rogers, author 
 of the " Guide to the New Forest," " there were many favourite localities, 
 as it contained the greatest number of beech tree3. When the spot was 
 
THE NEW FOREST 
 
 11 
 
 reached by the collected hogs, they were generally tired by their long 
 journey, but an abundant supper was provided for them, and they woke 
 up next day refreshed by a good sleep." This thoughtful provision for 
 the pigs' comfort is characteristic of the high respect in which the friendly 
 forest pig is held by its owner. " Plenty of food was then given them 
 for breakfast, the ' herd ' meanwhile blowing his horn ; after which they 
 had a little liberty, a few old ' pannage hogs ' accompanying them as 
 
 Highdife. 
 
 leaders. They usually did not want to stray far, as food was very 
 abundant, and in the evening were called by the horn, and fed as before. 
 After two or three days they were as obedient as possible, and would 
 assemble at any time on hearing the signal." 
 
 The old-fashioned, wild-looking, rust-coloured pig seems to have 
 disappeared from the forest, and good black modern swine have replaced 
 them. But they take very kindly to the life, and no one can know what 
 an intelligent, cleanly animal the pig is by nature till he has seen him 
 roaming half wild among the big trees, and apparently by common 
 
78 THE NEW FOREST 
 
 consent, the leader in all the daily movements for food, shelter, water, of 
 the mixed herd of cows, ponies, and donkeys with which he associates. 
 
 There are two minor common rights, probably very ancient, both of 
 which are much prized by their possessors. They confer the right of 
 fuel on the cottages to which they are attached. One is the right of 
 " Turbary," or cutting turf on the heaths, the other that of " Estovers " 
 or fuel. The turf right is not much used, except by the forest com- 
 moners ; and while stick gathering is so easy in the wooded parts of the 
 forest a poor man need never want small fuel. The rights of " Estover " 
 are supposed to date from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who enacted 
 that " no inhabiters of any house builded since the beginning of the 
 Queen Majesty's reign that now is, shall be allowed any wood in the 
 same forest to be burnt or expended therein." This right was much 
 abused, as whole trees of oak and beech were assigned, for the right 
 now applies to the timber of the hard-wood trees. This is now supplied 
 from the " waste of the forest," and by some curious result of the 
 drawing of recent acts, not from the inclosed young plantations, but 
 from the old woods of the Stuarts or Elizabeth. The right is, how- 
 ever, being bought up by the Crown when practicable, and the number 
 of loads is reduced from 800 to 367. 
 
 The future of these ancient woods is a matter of some concern to 
 those who are intrusted with the management of the forest. It is feared 
 that as the old trees die there will be few or no young trees to replace 
 them, as the greater number are destroyed by the cattle when saplings. 
 Meantime the 20,000 acres of Crown plantations are growing up to take 
 their phice, and as these are thrown open, the area covered with timber 
 trees will increase instead of diminishing. Meantime, when frost and 
 storm have widened the breaches in the Tudor woods, portions can be 
 inclosed from time to time for natural reproduction and the preservation 
 of that balance of wood, heath, swamp and pasture which makes the 
 scenery of the New Forest unique among the beauties of England. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adder-catcher, The, 32, 33 
 Alum Green, 27 
 Avon, The, 6 
 
 Beaulieu, 5, 6, 58 
 Abbey, 58 
 Gate House, 62 
 Heath, 22 
 River, 68, 70 
 
 Bogs, The Forest, 26 
 
 Brockenhurst, 10, 34 
 
 Buckler's Hard, 73 
 
 Cadenham Oak, 54 
 Calshot Castle, 6, 61 
 Charcoal Burner's Hut, 19 
 Christchurch, 6 
 Cobbett, 7, 23 
 CufFnaU's Park, 12, 14 
 
 Deer, 38, 39 
 
 „ hunt, 39, 40 
 Dennv Bog, 23 
 
 Forest Law, 7, 8 
 
 Gritnam Wood, 20, 26 
 
 Heaths, The Forest, 22, 23, 24 
 Henry H., 8, 53 
 „ HI., 8, 61 
 
 Herons, 27, 30 
 Honey-buzzard, 32 
 Hurst Castle, 61 
 Hussey, Edward, 60 
 
 Innocent HI., 61 
 
 John, King, 58 
 
 Knightwood, 28 
 
 Oak, 28 
 
 Langton, Archbishop, 61 
 Lingard, 6 
 Lymington, 5, 6, 68 
 
 ,, River, 17 
 
 Lyndhurst, 10, 12, 24 
 
 Emery Down, 14 
 
 Malwood, 5, 53, 56 
 
So 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Mark Ash, i8, 21 
 Matley Heath, 23 
 Matley Wood, 24 
 Minstcad Park, 56 
 
 Ober Heath, 22 
 „ Water, 23 
 Otters, 28 
 Ouse, 6 
 
 Poole, 54, 55 
 Ponies, 4.3 
 Pony Show, 48 
 Purkiss, 53 
 
 Ralph, Lord Montagu, 60 
 Rhinefield, 23 
 Ringwood, 12 
 
 Rouen, 5 
 
 Rufus, 6, 12, 52 
 " Stone, 54 
 
 St. Leonard's, 63, 64 
 Southampton Water, 6 
 Stony-cross, 52 
 Swan Green, 14, 48 
 Swine, 76 
 
 Tyrrell, Sir Walter, 52 
 
 Verderers' Hall, 10 
 Vinney Ridge, 27, 28, 30 
 
 William L, 6, 10 
 Winchester, 5, 53 
 Woodcock, 24 
 Wriotheslev, Sir Thomas, 60 
 
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