14 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



These may all be gone, but plenty of beauty is still left. 

 The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers 

 lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson 

 plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still 

 flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round 

 and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, 

 and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, 

 left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and 



in the winter, have been very swampy, as the gravelly formation of the 

 greater part of the soil supplies it with a natural drainage. Still, there 

 were swamps, and in the wet places large quantities of bog-oak have been 

 dug up, bearing witness, as in other countries, of an epoch of oaks, which 

 preceded the beech-woods. Gough, in his additions to Camden's Britannia, 

 vol. i., p. 126, describes Godshill as being in his day covered with thick 

 oaks. When, too, Lewis wrote in 1811, old people could then recollect 

 it so densely covered with pollard oaks and hollies that the road was easily 

 lost. (Historical Enquiries on the New Forest, p. 79, Foot-note.) No one, I 

 suppose, now believes that wolves were extirpated by Edgar. They and wild 

 boars are expressly mentioned in the Laws of Canute (Manwood: a Treatise of 

 the Lawes of the Forest, f. 3, 27, 1615), and lingered in the north of England 

 till Henry VIII.'s reign. (See further on the subject, The Zoology of Ancient 

 Europe, by Alfred Newton, p. 24.) I have hesitated, however, to include 

 the beaver, though noticed by Harrison, who wrote in 1574, as in his time 

 frequenting the Taf, in Wales (Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed's 

 Chronicle, ch. iv. pp. 225, 226.) The eggs of cranes, bustards, and bitterns, 

 were, we know, protected as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. 

 (Statutes of the Realm, vol. iii., p. 445, 25 Henry VIII., ch. xi., 4 ; and 

 vol. iv., p. 109, 3, 4, Ed. VI., ch. vii.) The last bustard was seen in the 

 Forest, some twenty-five years ago, on Butt's Plain, near Eyeworth. It is 

 a sad pity that the enormous collection of birds' bones, described as chiefly 

 those of herons and bitterns, found by Brander amongst the foundations of 

 the Priory Church at Christchurch (see Archaologia, vol. iv., pp. 117, 118), 

 were not preserved, as they might have yielded some interesting results. 

 We must, however, still bear in mind that there are far more points of 

 resemblance than of difference between the Forest of to-day and that of the 

 Conqueror's time ; especially in the long tracts of fern and heath and furze, 

 which certainly then existed, pastured over by flocks of cattle. 



