22 The New Forest : its Historj/ and its Scenery. 



Abroad he was feared by the bad, whilst at home such order 

 prevailed throughout England, that a man might travel in safety 

 " with his bosom full of gold " from one end to the other.* 



What I do here protest against is the common practice 

 of implicitly believing every tradition, of repeating every idle 

 story which has been foisted into the text either by credulity 

 or rancorous hatred — of, in fact, mistaking party feeling for 

 history. The Chroniclers had every reason to malign William. 

 His very position was enough. He had pressed with a heavy 

 hand on the Old-English nobles, stripped them of their lands, 

 their civil power, and their religious honours ; and failing to 

 learn, had, like a second Attila, tried to uproot their language. 



The truth is, we are so swayed by our feelings that the 

 most dispassionate writer is involuntarily biassed. We in fact 

 pervert truth without knowing we do so. Language, by its 

 very nature, betrays us. No historian, with the least vividness 

 of style, can copy from another without exaggeration. The 

 misplacement of a single word, the insertion of a single epithet, 

 gives a different colour and tone. And, in this very matter of 

 the New Forest, we need only take the various accounts, as they 

 have come down, to find in them the evidences of their own 

 untruth. t 



* The Chronicle. Ed. Thorpe. Vol. i. p. 354. This, of course, must 

 not be too literally taken It is one of those stock phrases Avhich so often 

 recur in literature, and may be found, under rather different forms, applied 

 to other princes. 



t Voltaire was the first to throw any doubt on the generally rcciived 

 account (E.ssai svr les Moeurs et V Esprit des Nations, torn. iii. ch. xlii. 

 p. 169. Pantheon Litteraire. Paris, 1836). He has in England been fol- 

 lowed by Warner (Topographical Remarks on the Soiith -Western Parts of 

 Hampshire, vol i. pp. 164-197), and Lewis, in his Historical Enqvii-irs 

 concerning the New Forest, pp. 42-55. 



