34 The New Forest: its History and its Scenery. 



After all, the best evidence is not from such arguments, 

 but in the simple fact that the New Forest remains still 

 the New Forest. Had the land been in any way profit- 

 able, modern skill, and capital, and enterprise, would have 

 certainly been attracted. But its charms lie not, and never 

 did, in the richness of its soil, but in its deep woods and 

 wild moors.* 



Our view of the matter, then, is that William, like all 

 Normans, loving the chase — loving, too, the red deer, as 

 the Old-English Chronicler, with a sneer, remarks, as if he 

 was their own father — converted what was before a half- 

 wooded tract, a great part of which he held in demesne, 

 inherited by right of being king, into a Royal Forest, giving 

 it the name of the New Forest, in contradistinction to its 

 former title of Ytene. To have laid waste a highly-cultivated 

 district for the purposes of the chase, as the Chroniclers wish 

 us to believe, would have defeated his chief object, as there 

 would have been no shelter then, nor for many years to come, 

 for the deer: and is contradicted, as we have seen, both by 

 Domesday, by the very nature of the soil, and the names 

 of the places. 



The real truth is, that the stories, which fill our histories, 

 of William devastating the country, burning the houses, mur- 

 dering the people, have arisen from a totally wrong conception 

 of an ancient forest. Until this confusion of an old forest with 

 our modern ideas is removed, we can have no clear notions 



* The names of the fields in the various farms adjoining the Forest — 

 Furzy Close, Heathy Close, Cold Croft, Starvesall, Hungry Hill, Rough 

 Pastures, &c. &c. — are not without meaning. The common Forest 

 proverb of " lark's-lees," applied to the soil, pretty clearly, too, shows 

 its quality. 



