Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/135

Rh the Midland Counties, and were walking by the side of the Warwickshire, instead of the Wiltshire Avon. In the place of wild heathery commons and furzy holts, deep lanes wind along by comfortable homesteads, thatched with Dorsetshire reed. Instead, too, of dark oak and beech woods, thick hedges are white in the spring with the scattered spray of the blackthorn, and orchards glow with their crimson wreaths of flowers.

Fordingbridge, formerly nothing else but Forde, now known to all fishermen for its pike and trout, in former days held the high-road into the Forest. On the bridge the lord of the manor, during the fence months, was obliged to mount guard, and stop all suspected persons, who could only on the north-west leave the Forest this way.

In Domesday it possessed a church and two mills, assessed at 14s. 2d. Though all its beech and oak woods, worth, on account of the pannage for swine, 20s. a year, were afforested, only three virgates of land were taken. Yet, notwithstanding this loss, it still paid the same rental as in Edward the Confessor's reign.

The old hospital, dedicated to St. John, was dissolved by Henry VI., and its revenues annexed to St. Cross, near Winchester. The church stands on the extreme south-west 117