Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/42

Rh The account of Florence of Worcester is, on the whole, equally unsatisfactory. His mention of the New Forest, like that, by the way, of most of the Chroniclers, does not occur in its proper place at the date it was made—when the wrong, we should have thought, must have been most felt—but is suggested by the death of Rufus, when popular superstition had come into play, and time had lent all the force of exaggeration to what must always have been an unpopular event. Florence, however, speaks in general terms of men driven from their homes, of fields laid waste, and houses and churches destroyed; words, which as we shall see, carry their own contradiction. Vitalis, too, not only declares that the district was thickly inhabited, but that it even regularly supplied the markets of Winchester, and that William laid in ruins no less than sixty parishes. Walter Mapes, who flourished about the middle of the twelfth century, adds further that thirty-six mother churches were destroyed, but falls into the error of making Rufus the author of the Forest, which of course materially affects his evidence.

Knyghton, however, who lived in the reign of Richard II., 24