Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/32

Rh These may all be gone, but plenty of beauty is still left. The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers—lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent.

preceded the beech-woods. Gough, in his additions to Camden's Britannia, vol. i., p. 126, describes Godshill as being in his day covered with thick oaks. When, too, Lewis wrote in 1811, old people could then recollect it so densely covered with pollard oaks and hollies that the road was easily lost. (Historical Enquiries on the New Forest, p. 79, Foot-note.) No one, I suppose, now believes that wolves were extirpated by Edgar. They and wild boars are expressly mentioned in the Laws of Canute (Manwood: a Treatise of the Lawes of the Forest, f. 3, § 27, 1615), and lingered in the north of England till Henry VIII.'s reign. (See further on the subject, The Zoology of Ancient Europe, by Alfred Newton, p. 24.) I have hesitated, however, to include the beaver, though noticed by Harrison, who wrote in 1574, as in his time frequenting the Taf, in Wales (Description of England, prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicle, ch. iv. pp. 225, 226.) The eggs of cranes, bustards, and bitterns, were, we know, protected as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. (Statutes of the Realm, vol. iii., p. 445, 25° Henry VIII., ch. xi., § 4; and vol. iv., p. 109, 3°, 4°, Ed. VI., ch. vii.) The last bustard was seen in the Forest, some twenty-five years ago, on Butt's Plain, near Eyeworth. It is a sad pity that the enormous collection of birds' bones, described as chiefly those of herons and bitterns, found by Brander amongst the foundations of the Priory Church at Christchurch (see Archæologia, vol. iv, pp. 117, 118), were not preserved, as they might have yielded some interesting results. We must, however, still bear in mind that there are far more points of resemblance than of difference between the Forest of to-day and that of the Conqueror's time; especially in the long tracts of fern and heath and furze, which certainly then existed, pastured over by flocks of cattle.

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