Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/58

Rh a forest is rather an account of its trees and its flowers and birds, than an historical narrative. Yet even here there are some important facts connected with the nation's life, and illustrating the character of its kings.

We meet with no perambulation of the New Forest until the eighth year of Edward I.—the second ever made of an English forest—and, by comparing it with Domesday, we may see how, since the Conqueror's time, the Forest had gradually taken the natural limits of the country—the Avon and the Southampton Water bounding it on the east and west, and the sea on the south, and the chalk of Wiltshire on the north.

The next perambulation in the twenty-ninth year of the same realm is more noticeable, as it disafforests so much. It is the same perambulation which we find made in the twenty-second 40