The Xcic Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



It has, I am aware, been urged that since the Old-English 

 churches were chiefly built of wood, we are not likely to find 

 any ruins. This may be so. But by no process of reasoning 

 can the absence of a thing prove its former presence. Nor 

 need we pay much attention to the argument drawn from such 

 names as Castle Malwood, The Castle near Burley, Castle Hill 

 on the banks of the Avon, Lucas Castle, and Brooniy and 

 Thompson Castles in Ashley Walk. If these names prove any- 

 thing, it is that there were a vast number of castles in the 

 Forest, and very few churches. But Castle Malwood was 

 standing long after the afforestation ; whilst the Castle at 

 Burley, and Castle Hill, and the others, were merely earthen 

 fortifications and entrenchments, made by the Kelts and West- 

 Saxons. Nor must we be led away by the few Forest names 

 ending in ton, the Old-English tun, which, after all, means 

 more often only a few scattered homesteads than even a 

 village, still less a town or city, in the modern sense of the 

 word.* 



* Mr. Thorpe notices, in his edition of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 94, foot- 

 note, its early use, in a document of Eadger's, A.D. 964, in the sense of a 

 town; but in the first place it certainly meant only an inclosed spot. There 

 appears to have been at some time, in the south part of the Forest, a church 

 near Wootton, the Odetune of Domesday, where its memory is still pre- 

 served in the name of Church Lytton given to a small plot of ground. 

 Rose, in his notes to the Red King, suggests that Church Moor and Church 

 Place indicate other places of worship. Church Moor is a very unlikely 

 situation, being a large and deep morass-, and could well, from its situation, 

 have been nothing else, and, in all probability, takes its name, in quite 

 modern tunes, from some person. But Church Place at Sloden, like Church 

 Green in Eyeworth Wood, is certainly merely the embankments near which 

 the Romano-British population employed in the Roman potteries, once 

 lived, and which ignorance and superstition have turned into sacred ground. 

 The word Lytton, at Wootton, however, makes the former position certain, 



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