Before and after the Norman Conquest. 



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, which overshadowed the town with its magnificence. 



Here, in 901, came J^thelwald the Jiltheling, son of ^Ethered, 

 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 He." That same night he fled to 

 Northumberland.! 



From Domesday we find that in Edward the Confessor's 

 time the manor belonged to the Crown, and that thirty-one 

 tenements paid a yearly tax of 16tZ. and a mill 5s., whilst 

 another, belonging to the Church, was worth but 30d. Its 

 woods, only, were enclosed 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 

 Avon. Here his son Baldwin de Redvers in vain fortified himself 



* Gibson, in his edition of The Chronicle in the " norainum locorum 

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

 between the Danes and Edward, was somewhere in the New Forest, deriving 

 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 

 Kitchen. 



f The Chronicle, Ed. Thorpe, vol. i. p. 178. Florence of Worcester, 

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



S 2 131 



