From Beaulieu I set out in the afternoon across the Forest, and at first over the western part of Beaulieu Heath for Brockenhurst.  The road across the heath is not in itself of much beauty, but it affords some glorious views both of the Forest and the sea.  As I drew nearer to Brockenhurst, however, I came into the woods, and the sylvan beauty of the vale, through which the Lymington River flows southward, was delicious.  Brockenhurst itself is charmingly embowered and is surrounded by some of the loveliest of the woodlands.  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 afforestation.  This