DEAN FOREST. 51 



of Henry III. ; and the same king made an order that 

 none should have an iron forge in the forest without a 

 special license from the king." 



It was in 1069 that William the Conqueror was hunting 

 in the Forest of Dean, when he received the first news of 

 an attack on the city of York by a Danish army, assisted 

 by the men of Yorkshire and Northumberland, in which 

 three thousand Normans had been killed. No sooner had 

 he learned the catastrophe, than he swore, 'by the 

 splendour of the Almighty,' his favourite oath, that he 

 would utterly exterminate the Northumbrian people, nor 

 ever lay his lance in rest, when he had once taken it up, 

 until he had done the deed. This fearful vow he carried 

 into effect. A havoc more complete and diabolical was 

 never perpetrated; it overpowered men's minds with a 

 wild horror and wonderment. William of Malmesbury, 

 who wrote about eighty years after, says, ' From York to 

 Durham not an inhabited village remained. Fire, slaughter, 

 and desolation made a vast wilderness there, which con- 

 tinues to this day.' Orderic Vitalis says, that more than 

 a hundred thousand victims perished. 



D. The New Forest. 



From the preceding accounts of different Forests, it may 

 be gathered that with the specific application made of the 

 old English term forest, to a royal hunting-ground of great 

 extent a use not unknown in the use made of the corres- 

 ponding term in other languages of Europe, but different 

 from the use generally made of the term at the present 

 day a forest may present a very different aspect from 

 such extended stretches of woodland, almost entirely 

 covered with trees, as are met with on the Jura ridge, 

 between France and Switzerland, on the Suabian Alps, 

 upon the Upper Rhine, upon the Hartz Mountains in 

 Germany, and in the more northern regions of Scandinavia, 

 Finland and Russia, 



