Saxon ballad of the Battle of Brunanburh!

Athelstan king,
Lord among earls,
Bracelet bestower and
Baron of barons;
He with his brother
Edmund Atheling
Gaining a lifelong
Glory in battle.
Slew with the sword-edge,
There by Brunanburh,
Brake the shield wall,
_Hew'd the lindenwood_,
Hack'd the battleshield,
Sons of Edward with hammered brands.

Oak, beech, and holly, which so largely make up the woodland of the New
Forest we have always had in England, but the limes which named
Lyndhurst it is said we owe to someone else, and if so it can only be
to the Roman.

What the Forest was when the Romans administered the land we know not;
but in Anglo-Saxon times it was doubtless a royal hunting ground,
_terra regis_ and _silva regis_, for spoiling which by fire as for
killing the game therein fines must be paid. These royal hunting
grounds, of which the great Forest in Hampshire was certainly not the
least, only became legal "forests" with the Conquest, when they were
placed under a new Forest law of extraordinary harshness, which even in
the Conqueror's time indeed demanded an eye or a hand for the taking
of game, and in the days of the Red King the life of a man for the life
of a beast.

The Conqueror, as we know, greatly enlarged the old "royal hunting
ground" here in Hampshire when he made the New Forest, and that act of
his which brought an immensely larger area than of old under a new and
incredibly harsher forest law gradually produced a legend of
devastation and depopulation here which, as I have already said, can no
longer be accepted as true. Henry of Huntingdon (1084?-1155) asserts
that "to form the hunting ground of the New Forest he (William) caused
churches and villages to be destroyed, and, driving out the people,
made it a habitation for deer." It is true that the Conqueror forged a
charter purporting to date from Canute in which the king's sole right
to take beasts of chase was asserted, and to this he appealed as
justifying his harsh new laws; but it is untrue that he depopulated
and destroyed a thriving district to make a wilderness for the red
deer. "We shall find," says Warner, "that the lands comprised in this
tract (the New Forest) appear from their low valuation in the time of
the Confessor to have been always unproductive in comparison with
other parts of the kingdo