The Chroniclers refuted by Themselves. 37 



in the heart of it unmolested. According to the Chroniclers 

 themselves, some rustics living on the spot convey, with a horse 

 and cart, the hleeding body of Rufus to Winchester. According 

 to them* also the King, previous to his death, must have feasted, 

 with his retinue of servants, and huntsmen, and priests, and 

 guests, somewhere in the Forest, implying means in the neigh- 

 bourhood to furnish, if not the luxuries, the necessities of life. 

 In Domesday we find, too, a keeper of the king's house holding 

 the mill at Efford ; also implying, at least, in a very different 

 part of the Forest, a neighbourhood which could not have been 

 quite destitute and deserted. f At a later period, when the 

 Forest Laws had reached their climax of oppression, persons 

 in the Forest, as we learn from Blount and the Testa de Nevill, 

 hold their lands at Lyndhurst and Eyeworth,:}: by finding pro- 

 visions for the king and fodder for his horse. But more than 

 all, Domesdily, corroborated as it is by the physical charac- 

 teristics of the country, by the evidence, too, of local names, by 

 the Norman doorways, and pillars and arches at Fawley, and 

 Brockenhurst and Milford, proves most distinctly — and most 

 distinctly because so circumstantially — that the district was 

 neither devastated, nor the houses burnt, nor the churches 

 destroyed, nor the people murdered. 



Some wrong, though, was doubtless committed : some hard- 

 ships undergone. Lands, however useless, cannot be afforested 



large timber and thick underwood, a cover for deer, but of extensive plains, 

 — still here preserved in the various leys — grazed over by cattle, with here 

 and there cultivated spots, and homesteads inhabited by a poor, but indus- 

 trious, population. 



* See chapter ix. p, 97, footnote. 



t See Domesday^ as before, p. xxix. b., under Einforde. 



X See chapters viii. p. 87, and x. p. 1 14. 



