Part 2

In his time the Foresters seem to have been a lawless race, and their lives rough and hard; but nowadays one happy feature of life in the Forest is the comparative prosperity of its poor. Many own their cottages, being descended from squatters, and to most of the older dwellings are attached Forest rights, comprising from one to ten loads of fuel, either peat or firewood, liberty to turn out cattle or ponies for a nominal fee, geese or donkeys free, and "pannage" for pigs--that is, leave to browse in the enclosures in the season of acorn and beechmast. These advantages are known as "chimney rights", and are closely connected with the hearthstone. In old days, when lawless or landless men often sought refuge in the Forest, a custom grew up that an encroacher who already had a roof on and a fire burning on his hearth could no longer be dispossessed; so often a hovel of sods, heather-thatched, was put up in a night and the claim established. Straggling hamlets of this kind sprang up usually on the border of a manor, as at the Weirs, at Beaulieu Rails (properly Royal, being Crown land), and at Hilltop. Now solid cottages in most cases replace the hovels, and some have got into the hands of the jerrybuilder, with lamentable results. The almost complete disappearance of the heather thatch is much to be regretted: it makes a splendid roofing, as impervious to heat and cold as straw, and its rich brown colour tones in wonderfully with the moorland landscape, especially when wet with winter fog and rain.

I have heard the Forester criticized as "independent". Why should he not be? He works when he needs, often for himself, and there is a dignity about him, and a determination to stand upon his ancient rights; he would rather give than take, and he would be affronted if you offered payment for his little gifts of sloes, of honey, or of "musharoons". The special forest industries are disappearing; the last charcoal burner's hut is really only preserved as a curiosity. You rarely see the gipsies platting mats or baskets, though there is an old man who still goes round, and sits by the roadside, reseating your old chairs with cane or rushes.

One of the favourite camping grounds of the gipsies is a crest of moor, fringed with Scotch firs, called Coldharbour, a name accounted for by some as _Col d'arbres_, "the ridge or neck of trees". It may well be, for the pines are a striking feature, very old and in their grouping very lovely, shorn by the prevailing winds into harmonious curves, bending away from the sea; for over Setley Plain the sea winds sweep, and often the sea mists too. Lifting my eyes from my writing, I can see as many as three caravans drawn up in the shade, for it is fair-time, and the spot, but just aside from the high road, affords a night's shelter to these nomads who travel from fair to fair, pasture too for their horses, and water from a pond formed at the bottom of an old gravel pit just below.

It is generally the vanners who come to this spot, vagrants rather than true gipsies ("Diddyki", the Romany calls them), and untidy in their leavings, which the genuine gipsy seldom is. These prefer to set up their snug little tents in the thicket of the Brake just across the plain. Here I have found a young mother with an infant of days in a tent on hoops, not much larger than a gig-umbrella, a fire hard by in a bell tent with a hole at the top. Going to pay a call with a pink flannel to wrap the baby in, I found mother and child warm, happy, and content, the former rejoicing in the permission accorded, under these circumstances, of a stay of two weeks. Once I ventured to condole with a gipsy woman on wild wintry weather in such a tent. She tossed back her jet-black plaits: "Oh, I likes it, my dear; I'm used to it, ye see".

If by nothing else, the gipsy may be distinguished from the ordinary tramp by his cheerful insouciant outlook on life, as well as a sense of humour not yet quenched by the Missioner, the Board School, and the perpetual harass of having to move on. These three factors, especially the second, tend to stamp out the gipsy as a race apart, or to make of him a very unsatisfactory low-class vagrant--a poor exchange. Unhappily the Missioner is rarely content to bring religion to the gipsy and leave him a gipsy still. He must needs try and induce him to abandon his way of life, to forsake his wholesome tent for an insanitary slum, and to send his children to school. If the Board School system is turning out a failure for our little peasants, what can we say for it when it claims the gipsy? The gipsy child simply cannot assimilate book-learning. He goes in sharp as a needle, cunning as a fox, sagacious with ancient woodland lore, long-sighted, keen of ear and scent; he comes out stupid, blear-eyed, often slightly deaf. The new knowledge drops away from him in a month; the old has been stamped out. You have made of him a lazy good-for-nothing, liable to colds and ailments hitherto unknown.

One rainy winter day I met a gipsy friend of mine and stopped to buy a brush. A little girl of eleven was helping to carry the basket; the wet and mud were squishing out of the poor child's boots, from the burst sides of which a sopped rag of stocking was exuding. I suggested that bare feet would be safer. "True it is, my lady, and full well I know it, but what can I do? 'Tis the schoolalities, you see; to school she must go, and I don't like for folks to pass remarks on my children."

BEAULIEU, BETWIXT THE WOOD AND THE SEA

Beyond Ladycross, anciently the boundary of the Abbey right of Sanctuary, opens another wide heath stretching every way--high, wind-swept, looking southward to Tennyson's monolith on Beacon Down, eastward to Portsdown Hill. At Hatchett Gate, where a pond with a bit of white paling and some wind-bent pines breaks the monotony, a truly modern note is struck, for close by Mr. Drexel has set up his hangars and his School of Aviation, and on the rare occasions when the wind drops a monoplane may be seen hovering over the waste. Thence the road goes steeply down to the valley through which the Exe finds its way to the sea, and over a jumble of red roofs gleams a broad water, and beyond, on green lawns, rises the old grey Palace House, once the residence of the abbot. This was the fair spot, the _Bellus Locus_, which John, though he loved not monks, chose for the Cistercian Abbey which, in a fit of compunction, he founded in 1204.

It was no life of idle contemplation that the brethren led. On the slopes above they had their vineyards, terraced towards the sun, with a raised causeway to wheel the grapes down to the wine-press, where the crumbling grey walls are still standing. Masons, too, must have been busy building and beautifying the great church, now level with the ground, though the foundations have been carefully traced and marked out. As cultivated land increased, granges were built, of which several remain: St. Leonard's, with its huge barn and portions of its chapel yet standing, Herford, and Sowley Grange over against Sowley pond, once called Colgrim Mere, where there were ironworks. The map in Gilpin's _Picturesque Scenery_ shows an opening to the sea at Pitt's Deep where the iron used to be shipped. The rival north soon carried off the trade, but Sowley firebacks may still be picked up in the neighbourhood.

The name Bergery, near Park, denotes a sheepcote, and Bouvery, spelt in the maps Beaufré, is, of course, the ox farm; there is also a Swinesley not far off, so the industries of the monks were many and various. But this busy, peaceful life was all too prosperous, rousing the cupidity of the king in the troubled times of the Reformation. To justify the spoliation, exaggerated tales of the scandal of sanctuary rights were told, and commissioners came down with their minds made up beforehand. Doubtless it was a matter liable to abuse, but in the rude days of blood feud and swift vengeance it was no bad thing that the Church should be able to stretch a sheltering arm over the criminal. But into all these questions this is no place to enter. Suffice it that the last abbot appointed was a creature of Cromwell's who, with thirty of his monks, was induced to sign a deed of surrender in consideration of a pension. The riches of the stately abbey went into the king's coffers, the domain was conferred on Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, grandfather to that Henry Wriothesley who was the friend of Shakespeare. Through marriage it passed to the Dukedom of Montague, then to that of Buccleuch, in which family it still remains in the person of Lord Montague of Beaulieu.

The whole story may be found in Sir James Fowler's recently published _History of Beaulieu Abbey_, with remarkable illustrations by Mr. F. Fissi, reconstructing from old records the abbey as it must have looked in its living days. The residence has, of course, known many alterations: the old vaulted room of the great gatehouse is now the dining-room of the Palace House, and the fine inner hall also belongs to the original building. On the floor above, what was once the chapel has been converted into a stately drawing-room, panelled probably in Tudor times when it was secularized. Much, of course, has been added at different dates. Not much more than a century ago the last Duke of Montague erected a castellated wall with a moat, fearing the descent of French privateers by the river. The old refectory makes a very lovely little church, the pulpit being the raised desk for the lector, approached by an arcade in the wall. Close by the church, in the shade of a row of lime trees fragrant and murmurous with bees, stands the Domus or Guest House--for hospitality was one of the prime obligations of the monks--now happily restored by Lord Montague and made a place of hospitality once more, the veritable centre of the social life of the village.

About two miles down the river, on the other shore, lies one of the quaintest, most interesting spots in the whole neighbourhood. Coming on it from above, it is almost startling in its oddity. It is hardly a village, just a wide street, grass-grown and asleep, leading down abruptly to queer and unaccountable remains of docks and stays, for this--this little desolate hamlet--was once, and not so long ago either, one of the important dockyards of this great seafaring nation of ours. From this cradle issued the _Agamemnon_, which carried Nelson at the battle of the Baltic, the _Euryalus_ and the _Swiftsure_, which both took part in the fight at Trafalgar. The last Duke of Montague proposed to build a town here and make it a port for the sugar trade with the West Indies, as he owned the island of St. Lucia; but by the Peace of 1748 this was ceded, and his scheme lapsed. The possibilities of the place, and especially the nearness to the Forest for the supply of oak timber, were seized upon by Henry Adams, who set up his shipbuilding yards, and turned out several fine frigates. In 1794 Gilpin writes: "The great number of workmen whom this business brought together, have given birth by degrees to a prosperous village". The end was tragic: Henry Adams was succeeded by his two sons, who carried on the business on the same lines; they were commissioned to build four ships by the Admiralty, and being unable to deliver them at the time agreed, were ruined by fines and litigation. Had this not happened, the business could not long have held its own; as wood was superseded by iron, the advantage of the Forest would have been lost; moreover, there is little doubt that the Exe is gradually silting up as the Lymington river has done.

The good days of Buckler's Hard are over, and no regular ferry plies now between the once busy dockyard and the farther shore; but the chances are the traveller will find an old boatman to put him across and land him under a dense wood, where a group of tall pines rises above a thick growth of oak and beech, and, following the road to the beach, he will come upon a scene typical of the strip of coast that borders the Forest, "betwixt the woods and the sea".

Here is no glory of headland, no fierceness of breaker on the reef, but a wide water, infinitely blue, lapping on the grassy margin where the trees lean over, or lying far out in long, shining lines between the flats--golden, purple, olive brown--where the white gulls stalk and feed--ungainly birds on land--and beyond again, sapphire and amethyst, rise the softly rounded chalk hills of the Island, ending in the milk-white Needles. Far to the left may possibly be discerned a dreadnought or two, just below where the escarpment on Portsdown Hill shows like a white smudge above the harbour.

The stones of the little beach are not worn smooth with the tide, but are loose and rough, held together by sea-holly and yellow horned-poppy and the coarse tawny grass that disputes the land with the seaweed. It is a place to dream in; not this time of the building of ships nor yet of the "White Company", but of long-past days when the Greek merchants used to come across Gaul from Massilia (Marseilles) and trade with Lepe for tin. A Roman road then crossed the Forest from the port to convey merchandise to the settlements of the Roman Provincials, and William the Norman and his Forest Laws were not yet looming on the horizon.

In Gilpin's day Lepe was "one of the port towns of the Forest, and, as it lies opposite Cowes, the common place of embarkation to the island". He also records the tradition that it was from this remote port that the Dauphin took ship, on the death of John, after his fruitless attempt on the English Crown. And here, also, the unfortunate Charles was brought from Titchfield House on his way to Carisbrooke under the ill-starred guidance of Ashburnham. "Here he was seated in an open boat, and from these shores he bade a last farewell to all his hopes in England."

Well may old Gilpin have averred that this southeast corner holds some of the loveliest bits of forest scenery, for within sight of the sea lies an enchanted wood, hard to find, impossible of access by motor, a place from which the cheap tripper will turn aside with the remark that there is nothing to see. It is true; yet the initiated may not impossibly find that the way through the wood is the way through the ivory gates. For him it holds a charm of restful silence, a beauty of gleam and gloom, of blue shadow sprinkled with the fairy whiteness of the enchanter's nightshade, of spaces of sunlight lying on the golden bracken, broad ways that must surely lead to the magician's castle, and narrow winding paths that can but have their goal in Elfland.

It is what in these parts we call a holm, a grove of oaks with a thick underwood of hollies grown into weird shapes with frequent cutting. Here and there is an aged thorn which has attained almost the size and girth of a forest tree, and in places Scotch firs lift their stately heads. In their tops the sea-sound murmurs, and about them is the hot fragrance the sun draws out of their resinous branches mingling with the tanny odour of the bracken. An alley through hollies meeting overhead is like a tunnel; it issues on a broad sunny level where four roads meet, each beckoning so enticingly, one is fain to sit down awhile to weigh their claims. One source of the peculiar loveliness of such a holm is that all the ways are green. The grass will flourish under oaks and hollies while it perishes under the beech, and where the fir trees stand, their roots are shrouded in bracken which in summer takes up the tale of greenness, and when October frosts come lights up the ways with gold.

It is a long coppice, and so strangely shaped that it is possible to make endless wanderings, and even to achieve the losing of one's way, till dusk falls and the owls are hooting to each other from upland to covert, and along the moonlit border of the wood the nightjar is churring with tumbling flight.

One thing only mars the harmony: over against a tumbledown thatched cottage a pert, shallow erection in reddest of red brick and shiniest of slate hideously obtrudes itself on the greenness. Yet the story of it is not without pathos. An old labourer, who had never earned more than fifteen shillings a week, saved and saved till he could buy the old cottage and build the new one in the pride of his heart.

LYNDHURST, THE GREENWOOD

Big village or little country town, as it may be regarded, Lyndhurst is not only the centre but the veritable capital of the district; for here, at the top of the steep street, stands the King's House, still the seat of government, and now inhabited by the Deputy Surveyor, who succeeded to the position of the Lord Warden. There is little of the palace of kings about the house, a solid and dignified yet homely structure standing close upon the pavement. It was built by Charles II on the site of an earlier one where his father often stayed for a few days' sport. It was from here, no doubt, that Charles Louis, the young exiled Elector Palatine, wrote to his mother of accompanying his uncle on a hunting excursion, and dated his letter "Lindust". Of late it has rarely been the residence of royalty. When George III on his way to his beloved Weymouth broke his journey, he was wont to stay at Cuffnells, with its wide park and its glory of rhododendrons, as the guest of Mr. George Rose, the friend of Pitt. But he seems to have honoured the King's House on one occasion.

Adjoining it, but with a separate entrance to the street, is the old Court House, in which for centuries the Swainmote has been held. Still six times a year the Verderers meet the Deputy Surveyor for the adjustment of any differences that may arise between the rights of the Commoners and those of the Crown. It is a fine old hall, though not large, panelled in oak and adorned with antlers. One very curious double pair are interlocked, the two stags having fought and become so entangled that both died of starvation before they were found. There is also an old stirrup iron, assigned traditionally to Rufus, but declared by experts to be not earlier than the time of Henry VIII. There is an oaken judge's seat and a table round which the Verderers sit like a board meeting, and a very ancient dock, worn shiny with the elbows and shoulders of delinquents--deer-stealers or encroachers.

The church occupies an eminence that should have made for beauty and impressiveness, but fritters away its advantage by a trivial little spire, further diminished in effect by an unmeaning pattern in coloured tiles upon the slate like the trimming on a woman's petticoat.

Lyndhurst stands in the very midst of the greenwood. All around it lies, deep in shade and silence, and, turning aside from the dusty highway, it is still possible to forget the existence of blaring motor or hilarious chars-à-bancs. Through the long green glades one may ramble for a whole summer day without meeting so much as a keeper to ask one's way. As to maps, the highway once left, they are a delusion and a snare, giving paths that lead nowhither, or worse, land the traveller in an impassable morass. The safest rule is, follow the widest; it is sure to bring you out somewhere, if not in the direction you want to go, for the Forest is well intersected with roads. The only other risk is from vipers--especially now "Brusher Mills", the snake-catcher, is no more.

The wanderer, if not a first-rate walker, will do well to mount a pony--a forest pony, be it said; for they know a bog when they see it, and will not set foot upon its promising but treacherous surface. Moreover, they are immune from the attacks of the maddening forest fly, and if they do not know the way, are at least likely to make a better guess at it than a bicycle. Taking cover just beyond Millyford Bridge from off the hot highroad, and turning through Puckpits to Withybed Bottom, I have sighed for a four-footed beast, especially when presently the only way goes up a steep hill between paltry plantations of young firs, giving not the least modicum of shade, by a track that had been bog in winter, and has become a mass of sun-baked clods. A pony would have picked his way and carried his rider; at least he would not have required to be shoved up the hill by main force, like my unfortunate Lee Francis. Compensation is in store: at the top of the hill a lovely upland opens out, shaded by detached groups of splendid beeches in their prime, with no underwood to obscure the modelling of their grey-green columns. It is unusual to see the ground beneath beech trees a vivid green, since grass will not grow at their roots, but all about was a close-growing bed of bog-myrtle, softer and brighter than bracken in its hue. Beneath the slope, radiant in sunshine, lies a wide misty valley, and beyond it the eye travels to blue heights of down above Winchester. The track across the upland would lead to Stonycross, but of this more anon; we must return to the woodland.

The better-known enclosures are those of Mark Ash, Knightwood, and Rhinefield. These are all crossed by practicable roads, and, though full of fine trees and great beauty, seem to have lost something of the indefinable wild-wood charm that haunts the lonelier spots. The excursionist who likes to see something definite will visit the "King of the Forest" and the noted Knightwood Oak, which has had to be fenced round to preserve it from the attentions of its admirers. Across Rhinefield runs the much-visited Ornamental Drive. Heavy Wellingtonias and dark evergreens stand in stiff rows, gloomy without impressiveness, utterly out of keeping with the surroundings. To me the only pleasure connected with it is the sense of escape with which one emerges and finds oneself beneath the beeches at Vinny Ridge, after two miles of drear and dusty formality. For the roadway, instead of being left, like the grassy and well-trodden bridle-paths of the forest, to Nature's keeping, has been ploughed up and cleared of the binding roots and turf without being made into a proper road. Pony-cart or bicycle has to plod its weary way through a foot or two of loose sand in summer, thick mud in winter.

One happy way of exploring these woods is to choose some stream and follow its course as far as may be. Bolderford Bridge over Highland Water is a good starting-point, and begins with Queen's Bower, a very favourite spot. Fine old oaks stand about a lawn round which the brook meanders. In late autumn or early spring I have seen it look very beautiful, but in a parched August, the brook low, the grass worn and burnt, adorned, moreover, with the debris of many a picnic party, it has rather a jaded air. The actual Bower, which the country folk call Queen Anne's, is an almost island formed by a loop of the stream, where a grove of slender ash trees surrounds a sturdy oak. I have not been able to discover what Queen it was connected with, but make no doubt it must have been the golden-haired Danish princess of the nursery game--

"Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sits in the sun As fair as a lily, as white as a swan"--

rather than the homely daughter of Anne Hyde. Moreover, Anne of Denmark and her spouse, James I, both passionately loved sport and pageants, and may well have had some little masque arranged there for their entertainment while staying at the King's House for hunting.