WOLMER AND HOLT FOREST. 
21 
czttle, can render this meer so remarkable as the great quantity 
of coins that were found in its bed about forty years ago. But, 
as such discoveries more properly belong to the antiquities of 
this place, I shall suppress all particulars for the present till I 
enter professedly on my series of letters respecting the more re- 
mote history of this village and district. 
LETTER IX. To T. PENNANT, Esa. 
By way of supplement, I shall trouble you once more on this 
subject, to inform you that Wolmer, v^ith her sister forest Ayles 
Holt, alias Alice Holt,* as it is called in old records, is held by 
grant from the crow^n for a term of years. 
The grantees that the author remembers are Brigadier General 
Emanuel Scroope Hov^^e and his lady, Ruperta (v^ho was a na- 
tural daughter of Prince Rupert by Margaret Hughes), a Mr. 
Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who married a dowager 
lady Pembroke, Henry Bilson Legge and lady, and now Lord 
Stawel, their son. 
The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long sur- 
viving her husband ; and, at her death, left behind her many 
curious pieces of mechanism of her father's constructing, who 
was a distinguished mechanic and artist,t as well as warrior, 
and, among the rest, a very complicated clock, lately in posses- 
sion of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game-painter at Farnham, in 
the county of Surrey. 
Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow range 
of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different ; for the 
Holt consists of a strong loam of a miry nature, carrying a good 
turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber, 
while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste. ^ 
* "In Rot. Inqiiisit. de statu for?ist. in Scaccar. .16 Ed. 3. it is called Aisholt." In the same, 
"Tit Woolmer and Aisholt Hantisc. Dominus Rex habet unam capellam in haia sii4 Kingesle.'' 
" Haia, sepe.s, sepimentum, parcus : a Gall, haie and haj'e."— Spelman's Glossary. 
t The invention of mezzotinto engraving is generally ascribed to Prince Rupert, though some 
would rather assign it to Lieut. Col. Siegend, an officer in the service of the Landgrave of Hesse, 
so early as in the year 1643, from whom, it is said, the prince derived the secret. In Elme's life 
of Sir Christopher Wren, it is attributed to that eminent architect ; and the editor of ** Paren- 
talia," speaking on this subject with decision, states that " he [Sir Christopher] was the first 
inventor of the art of engraving in mezzotinto, which was afterwards prosecuted and improved by 
his royal highness Prince Rupert, in a manner somewhat different, upon the suggestion, it is said, 
of the learned John Evelyn, Esq.^' — Ed. 
t A stiff, clayey soil, well drained, is of all others the most congenial and adapted to the 
