Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/94

Rh its own story. It consists of one long straggling street, and a few scattered houses, with one or two village inns. Much of its wildness has been spoilt by the railroad; and in consequence, too, of the adjoining manor of Brockenhurst, it appears even less than it really is in the Forest. Still, however, if the reader wishes to see the Forest woods and heaths towards the south, let him come here, and the village accommodation will only give an additional charm to the scenery. I, for my part, do not know that a clean English village inn, with its sanded floor, and its best parlour kept for state occasions, makes such bad quarters. It is a real pleasure to find some spots on the earth not yet disfigured by fashionable hotels.

At Brockenhurst existed one of those tenures of knight-service once so common throughout England. Here Peter Spelman, an ancestor of the antiquary, held a carucate of land by the service of finding for Edward II. an esquire clad in coat of mail for forty days in the year, and whenever the King came to the village to hunt, litter for his bed, and hay for his horse, which last clause will give us some insight into the often rough living and habits of the fourteenth century. Here, too, not many years ago, droves of deer would at night, when all was still, race up the village street, and the village dogs leap out and kill them, or chase them back to the Forest.

The church, one of the only two in the Forest mentioned 76