192 THE WILD-FLOWERS OF SELBORNE 



feet above the low marshy ground, is a conspicuous 

 object in the landscape, and throws its spell over the 

 whole neighbourhood. 



In olden days the appearance of the parish was 

 entirely different from what it is now. At the time of 

 the Domesday " record " about three hundred acres only 

 were under some rough sort of cultivation. As late 

 as the sixteenth century the larger part of the parish 

 was covered with oak and beech and brushwood, 

 where the peasants had free pasture and " pannage " 

 for swine. Open marshes, covered with water at 

 every high tide, skirted the shore, and sheltered 

 thousands of wild-fowl which, in bad weather, con- 

 gregated in the harbour. A number of widgeon, called 

 " wygones " in an old document, and so many quarters 

 of salt from the village salt-pits, were the regular pay- 

 ments to the king's treasury. Red-deer roamed in the 

 forest, and often descended from the long chalk ridge, 

 then covered with gorse and dotted here and there 

 with yew-trees, to drink at the clear spring of fresh 

 water which still rises in the meadow below. The 

 timber has now all disappeared ; not a copse, hardly 

 a clump of trees, remains ; the marshes are converted 

 into rough pasture ; the wild-fowl, except in very 

 severe weather, are seldom seen ; the last of the red- 

 deer was killed by the " Waltham Blacks " at the 

 beginning of the eighteenth century ; and the poetry 

 and romance of the ancient ruin, with its stories of 

 royal visitors, of unhappy captives pining in the 

 Norman dungeons, of tournaments and falconry, of 

 French prisoners and of military deserters, has almost 

 entirely disappeared. 



Yet for all lovers of country life, for the botanist 

 and the naturalist, the parish is still full of interest. 



