ns, and of abundance of villages, turning the poor people out of their
habitations and possessions, and laying all open for his deer. The same
histories likewise record that two of his own blood and posterity, and
particularly his immediate successor William Rufus, lost their lives in
this forest--one, viz., the said William Rufus, being shot with an arrow
directed at a deer which the king and his company were hunting, and the
arrow, glancing on a tree, changed his course, and struck the king full
on the breast and killed him. This they relate as a just judgment of God
on the cruel devastation made here by the Conqueror. Be it so or not,
as Heaven pleases; but that the king was so killed is certain, and they
show the tree on which the arrow glanced to this day. In King Charles
II.'s time it was ordered to be surrounded with a pale; but as great part
of the paling is down with age, whether the tree be really so old or not
is to me a great question, the action being near seven hundred years ago.

I cannot omit to mention here a proposal made a few years ago to the late
Lord Treasurer Godolphin for re-peopling this forest, which for some
reasons I can be more particular in than any man now left alive, because
I had the honour to draw up the scheme and argue it before that noble
lord and some others who were principally concerned at that time in
bringing over--or, rather, providing for when they were come over--the
poor inhabitants of the Palatinate, a thing in itself commendable, but,
as it was managed, made scandalous to England and miserable to those poor
people.

Some persons being ordered by that noble lord above mentioned to consider
of measures how the said poor people should be provided for, and whether
they could be provided for or no without injury to the public, the answer
was grounded upon this maxim--that the number of inhabitants is the
wealth and strength of a kingdom, provided those inhabitants were such as
by honest industry applied themselves to live by their labour, to
whatsoever trades or employments they were brought up. In the next
place, it was inquired what employments those poor people were brought up
to. It was answered there were husbandmen and artificers of all sorts,
upon which the proposal was as follows. New Forest, in Hampshire, was
singled out to be the place:--

Here it was proposed to draw a great square line containing four thousand
acres of land, marking out two large highways o