After all, the best evidence is not from such arguments, but in the simple fact that the New Forest remains still the New Forest. Had the land been in any way profitable, modern skill, and capital, and enterprise, would have certainly been attracted. But its charms lie not, and never did, in the richness of its soil, but in its deep woods and wild moors.[1]
Our view of the matter, then, is that William, like all Normans, loving the chase—loving, too, the red deer, as the Old-English Chronicler, with a sneer, remarks, as if he was their own father—converted what was before a half-wooded tract, a great part of which was his own as demesne, and the whole as prerogative, into a Royal Forest, giving it the name of the New Forest, in contradistinction to its former title of Ytene. To have laid waste a highly-cultivated district for the purposes of the chase, as the Chroniclers wish us to believe, would have defeated his chief object, as there would have been no shelter then, nor for many years to come, for the deer: and is contradicted, as we have seen, both by Domesday, by the very nature of the soil, and the names of the places.
The real truth is, that the stories, which fill our histories, of William devasting the country, burning the houses, murdering the people, have arisen from a totally wrong conception of an ancient forest. Until this confusion of an old forest with our modern ideas is removed, we can have no clear notions
- ↑ The names of the fields in the various farms adjoining the Forest—Furzy Close, Heathy Close, Cold Croft, Starvesall, Hungry Hill, Rough Pastures, &c. &c.—are not without meaning. The common Forest proverb of "lark's-lees," applied to the soil, pretty clearly, too, shows its quality.
