Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/55

Rh in the heart of it unmolested. According to the Chroniclers themselves, some rustics living on the spot convey, with a horse and cart, the bleeding body of Rufus to Winchester. According to them also the King, previous to his death, feasted, with his retinue of servants, and huntsmen, and priests, and guests, at Castle Malwood, implying some means in the neighbourhood to furnish, if not the luxuries, the necessities of life. In Domesday we find, too, a keeper of the king's house holding the mill at Efford; also implying, at least, in a very different part of the Forest, a neighbourhood which could not have been quite destitute and deserted. At a later period, when the Forest Laws had reached their climax of oppression, persons in the Forest, as we learn from Blount and the Testa de Nevill, hold their lands at Brockenhurst and Eyeworth, by finding provisions for the king and fodder for his horse. But more than all, Domesday, corroborated as it is by the physical peculiarities of the country, by the evidence, too, of local names, by the Norman doorways, and pillars and arches at Fawley, and Brockenhurst and Milford, proves most distinctly—and most distinctly because so circumstantially—that the district was neither devastated, nor the houses burnt, nor the churches destroyed, nor the people murdered.

Some wrong, though, was doubtless committed: some hardships undergone. Lands, however useless, cannot be afforested 37