130 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



painted for us on our city walls, and written for us upon our 

 gates and crumbling castles. Our towns are in themselves 

 the best texts upon history. For what we have seen with 

 our eyes, and touched with our hands, leaves a more vivid 

 and more lasting impression than the closest study of libraries 

 of histories. 



Further, the picture of a mediaeval town, as given in its own 

 archives, with its own legislation, its peculiar manufacture, or 

 import, forms, to some extent, the true social picture of the 

 times. Its history reflects — and not faintly — the history of the 

 day. Christchurch was never a town of sufficient importance to 

 show all this in its municipal records. Yet, too, we shall see 

 that they in another way are, like the town itself, full of interest. 

 From a modern point of view there is nothing to be seen beyond 

 three or four straggling streets and its manufactory of fusee 

 watch-chains — the only one in England. All its interest and 

 associations lie with the past. The country round it, too, is 

 equally bound up with that same past. To the north rises 

 St. Catherine's Hill, which we saw from the valley of the Avon, 

 with its oval and square camps, and rampart and double vallum, 

 crested with the mounds of its Roman watch-towers. The 

 river Stour winds along between rows of barrows. Hengist- 

 bury Head is still fortified by its vast earthworks, and entrenched 

 by deep ditches from the Avon to the sea.* Here the Britons 

 saw the first swarm of fugitive Belgae land and spread themselves 

 along the rich valleys of Dorsetshire. f Here, centuries after- 



* In Archaologia, vol. v. pp. 337-40, is a description, iUustrated with 

 a plan of these entrenchments, together with the adjoining barrows, most of 

 which have been opened, but the accounts are very scanty and unsatisfactory. 



t See Dr. Guest on the " Belgic Ditches," vol. viii. of the Archaulogical 

 Journal, v. 14.5. 



130 



