THE
NEW FOREST

Described by Elizabeth Godfrey
Pictured by E. W. Haslehust

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED

LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY

1912

In these modern days, when towns are increasing on every side, and the new idea of garden cities threatens to swallow up what little is left us of the true country, it is good to remember that in one quiet corner of Hampshire lies a sanctuary, a little region set apart with its own laws and customs for over eight centuries for the preservation of wild life.

In our childhood we were taught to look upon the deed of Norman William with horror, as an iniquity perpetrated by an inhuman conqueror, and we spouted in the words of good Miss Smedley:

“Oh Forest! green New Forest! Home of the bird and breeze,
With all thy soft and sweeping glades, and long, dim aisles of trees,
Like some ancestral palace thou standest proud and fair;
Yet is each tree a monument to death and wild despair.”

Now we have come to bless his name as one of the greatest of our benefactors. Moreover, the scientific historian has been at work, and has completely demolished the legend. The serious student may be referred to Wise’s History of the New Forest, where he will find the evidence thoroughly sifted; for this slight story it will be enough to gather up the results. To begin with, the Saxon name of Ytene, by which the district was known before it became the New Forest, denotes a furzy waste, as much of it is to this day—“hungry uplands and marshy valleys”—and the fact that, although traces of Roman occupation are found on the borders, and Roman roads seem to have crossed it, no Roman villa has been unearthed within its precincts, goes far to prove that this could have been no smiling land of plenty, or the invaders would surely have settled in a spot lying so handy to the seacoast. Buckland Camp, on its southern confines near Lymington, shows that they had it in possession, and to this stronghold the British general, Natan Leod, fell back when driven from Calshot Castle by the Saxons. His Roman name of Ambrosius is found in Ampress Farm hard by.

Probably Canute, who had his capital at Winchester, and was much at Southampton, had a chase here, for he, like Norman William, was a mighty hunter, as the stringency of his forest laws testifies.

Regarding the size and nature of the district, neither churches nor villages could have been much more numerous than at the present day, and as some of the former, still standing, are mentioned in “Domesday Book”, the wholesale destruction of the old Chronicles must have been grossly exaggerated. When William annexed the district to