Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/331

 Hampshire Folklore. 295

romancers, supplied the capital with corn ! The tale of the ruthless king lingers yet, and oral tradition is not alone responsible for its longevity.

Of these immemorial forests we have to-day the still wide area of the New Forest. The Forest of Bere is now practically non-existent, but Woolmer is more wooded, with its modern pine plantations, than it was when White of Selborne knew it as a " sandy waste." Alice Holt and Buckholt, two small forests to the north-west of Woolmer, show older timber, — mainly oak. Windsor Forest no longer touches the county, but it has left some wild remnants at Pamber, and there are traces of the old rough foresters in the people thereabouts. Kingsley noticed the same at Eversley, and you will find it to-day on the outskirts of Pamber Forest, about Tadley, — " God-save-us- Tadley," as it is called in consequence of the amazed exclamation of a villager when a balloon descended in the vicinity something like a century ago. The lord of the manor of Pamber enjoyed hunting rights throughout Windsor Forest. He was elected yearly by the assembled tenants. " The parishioners here were . . . free franchisers, and were never held under any feudal tenure." ^ At Ibthorpe in the north-west corner, once comprised in the Forest of Chute, the commoners are themselves the lords of the manor, and both owners and occupiers have rights on the two commons, and everything growing thereon, for their own use, but not for sale. Charlotte Yonge noted similar tenures at Merdon, which manor is among the nine in Hampshire with Borough-English law of inheritance.

I might mention that the son of a local landowner told me that " hearth-right tenures " obtain to this day in the New Forest. He pointed out a ruin with patched chimney, repaired just enough to permit the yearly fire to be kindled that would make good the holder's title to the land. This was near Fritham and Bramshaw. I was further told that

^ Kelly, County Topographies^ Hampshire, p. 244.