Before and after the Noiinan Conquest. 131 



wards, the West-Saxons watched the raven - standard of the 

 Danes scouring down the Channel, and knew their course along 

 the coast, at night, by the blaze of burning villages, and, in the 

 day, by the black trail of smoke.* 



But to return to the town. Its Old-English names, Tweonea 

 and Twinham-burn, were given to it from its situation between 

 the rivers Avon and Stour. They were afterwards corrupted 

 into the Norman Thuinam ; which was lost in the name of 

 its Priory, overshadowing the town with its magnificence. 



Here, in 901, came ^thelwald the iEtheling, son of ^thered, 

 in his rebellion against his cousin Edward the Elder, and seized 

 the place. From Christchurch he fell back upon Wimborne, which 

 he fortified, exclaiming he would do one of two things, " Either 

 there live, or there lie." That same night he fled to 

 Northumberland.f 



From Domesday we find that its manor was held in demesne 

 by the Conqueror, as also by Edward the Confessor, with a mill 

 renting for 5s., whilst another, belonging to the Church, was 

 worth but SOd., and that thirty-one tenements in the borough 

 paid a rent of IGd. Its woods, only, were inclosed in the 

 Forest. 



The manor remained in the hands of the Crown till Henry I. 

 bestowed it on his friend and kinsman Richard de Redvers, 

 Earl of Devon, the ruins of whose castle still overlook the 



* Gibson, in his edition of 77ie Chronicle— in the "nominum locorum 

 explicatio," p. 50, seems to think that Yttingaford, where peace was made 

 between the Danes and Edward, was somewhere in the New Forest, derivin"- 

 the word from Ytene, the old name of the district. Mr. Thorpe, however, 

 in his translation of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 77, suggests that it may be 

 Ilitchen. 



t The Chronicle, Ed. Thorpe, vol. i. p. 178. Florence of Worcesk-r, 

 Kd. Thorpe, vol. i. pp. 117, 118. 



S 2 131 



