. The church stands
high, perhaps as a guide, over a woodland churchyard, and is the
evident successor of a Norman building, as its south doorway and font
of Purbeck bear witness and the chancel arch too, unless indeed this be
earlier still. The chancel, however, dates from the fourteenth
century, a good example in its littleness of the Decorated style, but
it is half spoiled by the enormous pew which blocks the entrance. The
tower and spire and a good part of the nave are completely modern. The
great yew in the churchyard must date at least from Edward I.'s time,
and perhaps may have seen the day on which Red William fell.

From Brockenhurst, on the following morning, I set out again over the
open heath for Boldre southward. Many a fine view over the woods I had,
and once, as I came down Sandy Down, I caught sight of the Isle of
Wight. Then the scene changed, and I came through meadows, and past
coppices into Boldre. In the midst of a wood, as it were, I suddenly
found the church, and this interested me more than I can well say, for
here again I found what at one time must have been a complete Norman
building. Surely if the history-books are right this is an astonishing
thing; but then, as I have long since learned, the history one is
taught at school is a mere falsehood from start to finish. There is
probably no schoolboy in England who has not read of the awful cruelty
and devastation that went with the formation of the New Forest, by the
Conqueror in 1079. It is generally spoken of as only less appalling
than the burning of Northumberland. It is said that more than fifty-two
parish churches within the new bounds of the New Forest were destroyed,
and a fertile district of a hundred square miles laid waste and
depopulated to provide William with a hunting-ground. Now if this be
true how does it come that upon my first day in the Forest I find a
Norman church at Brockenhurst with something very like a Saxon chancel
arch, and that upon my second day I walk right into another church in
part Norman too? This is surely an astonishing thing. It is also, I
find, a fact that much of the New Forest had been a royal hunting-
ground in the Saxon times, and that the afforestation of William is not
so much as mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle. The whole story of the
devastation of this great country would seem to rest upon the writings
of William of Jumieges or Ordericus Vitalis, neither of whom was alive
at the time of the aff