The Chroniclers refuted by Themselves. 



in the heart of it unmolested. According to the Chroniclers 

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

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

 to them* also the King, previous to his death, feasted, with his 

 retinue of servants, and huntsmen, and priests, and guests, at 

 Castle Malwood, implying some means in the neighbourhood 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 desti- 

 tute 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 Brockenhurst and Eyeworth,| by finding provisions for the 

 king and fodder for his horse. But more than all, Domesday, 

 corroborated as it is by the physical peculiarities 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. 



f See Domesday, as before, p. xxix. b., under Einforde. 



J See chapters vii. and x. 



37 



