24 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



The account of Florence of Worcester is, on the whole, 

 equally unsatisfactory. His mention of the New Forest, like 

 that, by the way, of most of the Chroniclers, does not occur 

 in its proper place at the date it was made — when the wrong, we 

 should have thought, must have been most felt — but is suggested 

 by the death of Rufus, when popular superstition had come 

 into play, and time had lent all the force of exaggeration to 

 what must always have been an unpopular event. Florence,* 

 however, sj^eaks in general terms of men driven from their 

 homes, of fields laid waste, and houses and churches destroyed : 

 words which, as we shall see, carry their own contradiction. 

 Vitalis,t too, not only declares that the district was thickly 

 inhabited, but that it even regularly supplied the markets of 

 Winchester, and that Wi:liam laid in ruins no less than sixty 

 parishes. Walter Mapes, J who flourished about the middle 

 of the twelfth century, adds further that thirty-six mother 

 churches were destroyed, but falls into the error of making 

 Rufus the author of the Forest, which of course materially 

 affects his evidence. 



Knyghton, § however, who lived in the reign of Richard II., 



* Chronicon ex Chronicis. Ed. Thorpe. Vol. ii. p. 45. Published 

 by the English Historical Society. 



f Historia Ecclesiastica^ pars. iii. lib. x., in the Patrologicc Cursus 

 Compleiiis. Ed. J. P. Migne. Tom. clxxxviii. p. 749 c. Paris, 1855. 



J De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones QtaiKjue, distinc. v. cap. vi. p. 222. 

 Published by the Camden Society. 



§ De Eventihus AngUa^ lib. ii. cap. vii., in Twysden's Historia. AnglicaneR 

 Scriptor-es Decent, p. 2373. I am almost ashamed to quote Knyghton, but it 

 is as well to give the most unfavourable account. Spotswood, in his History 

 of the Church of Scotland (book ii. p. 30, fourth edition, 1577), repeats the 

 same blunder as Walter Mapcs and Knyghton, adding that the New Forest 

 was at Winchester, and that Kufus destroyed thirty churches. 



24 



