orestation. This must have been known surely to
our modern historians; but so is the history of England written. Our
real grievance against William was not his afforestation, but his cruel
Forest Law, which demanded the limb of a man for the life of a beast, a
thing I think unknown in England before his advent. It was this harsh
law, so bitterly resented, which at last, as we may think, cost William
Rufus his life. But the old tale remains, and therefore I was greatly
astonished in Boldre Church.

Doubtless the original Norman church consisted of a nave, chancel and
north and south aisles. The south aisle remains, as does the arcade
which separates it from the nave. In the Early English time the north
aisle was rebuilt or added, perhaps, for the first time, and the
chancel rebuilt. Later the church was lengthened westward, and the
tower built at the eastern end of the Norman aisle. In that aisle there
is a tablet to William Gilpin, the author of "Forest Scenery," who was
vicar of Boldre for a generation, dying in 1804 aged eighty years. He
is buried in the churchyard.

Boldre is certainly a place to linger in, a place that one is sorry to
leave, but I could not stay, being intent on Lymington. Therefore I
went down through the oak woods, over Boldre Bridge, to find the high
road, which presently brought me past St Austin's once belonging to
the Priory of Christchurch, under Buckland Rings to the very ancient
borough of Lymington, with its charming old ivy-clad church tower at
the end of the High Street. The church, in so far as it is old of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has little to boast of, for it has
been quite horribly restored. In the long street of Lymington I slept.

There seemed to be nothing to keep me in Lymington, and therefore,
early upon the following morning, I set out for Milford, five miles
away by the sea, and there I wonderfully saw the Needles and the great
Island and found another Norman church, Norman that is to say in its
foundations. All Saints, Milford, consists to-day of chancel with north
and south chapels west of it, transepts, nave with north and south
aisles, and a western chapel on either side the western tower, and a
south porch. It is a most beautiful and interesting building. Doubtless
there originally stood here a twelfth-century Norman church, consisting
of nave with aisles and chancel, of which two arches remain in the
south arcade of the nave. Then in the thirteenth cen