The King granted a small part, namely, one virgate to “Herbert the Forester,” before 1086, and this Herbert is generally supposed to have been the ancestor of those Lyndhursts who for so long held the wardenship of the Forest.  The King’s house, a fine building of Queen Anne’s time, is the successor of the old royal lodge at least as old as the fourteenth century, and is now occupied by the Deputy Surveyor of the Forest.  In the Verderers’ Hall close by, the forest courts of the verderers are still held.  There, too, may be seen the old dock, certain trophies of the chase and “the stirrup-iron of William Rufus,” really the seventeenth century gauge “for the dogs allowed to be kept in the forest without expeditation, the ‘lawing’ being carried out on all ‘great dogs’ that could not pass through the stirrup.”

Lyndhurst itself, as we see it to-day, is devoid of interest; even the church dates but from 1863, and its greatest treasure is the wall-painting by Lord Leighton of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in the chancel.  A church, a chapelry of Minstead, certainly stood here in the thirteenth century, but was destroyed, and a Georgian building erected —­in its turn to give place to the church we see.

Lyndhurst, though almost without interest itself, is undoubtedly the best centre for exploring the Forest, or, at any rate, perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most interesting parts of it.  So by many a byway I went northward to Minstead in Malwood, where I found a most curious church, rather indeed a house than a church, with dormer windows in the roof, an enormous three-decker pulpit within, galleries, and two great pews, one with a fireplace, and I know not what other quaint rubbish of the eighteenth century.  All this I found enchanting, and more especially because the nave and chancel seemed to me to be originally of the thirteenth century, and certainly the font is Norman.  But the church with its eighteenth-century tower is perhaps the most amazing conglomeration of the work of all periods since the twelfth century to be found in southern England.

From Minstead I went on up the Bartley water to Stone Cross, nearly four hundred feet over the Forest, from which by good fortune I saw the mighty Abbey of Romsey in the valley of the Test, where I intended to sleep.  Then I went down past Castle Malwood to where stands Rufus’ Stone.  There I read: 

“Here stood the oak-tree on which an arrow shot by Sir Walter Tyrrell at a stag glanced and struck King William II., surnamed Rufus, on the breast, of which stroke he instantly died on the 2nd August 1100.

“King William II., surnamed Rufus, being slain as before related, was laid in a cart belonging to one Purkess and drawn from hence to Winchester and buried in the cathedral church of that city.

“That where an event so memorable had happened might not hereafter be unknown this stone was set up by John Lord Delaware who had