As we leave Brockenhurst we find ourselves more and more in the Forest. The road to Lyndhurst is one long avenue of trees—beeches with their smooth trunks, oaks growing in groups, with here and there long lawns stretching far away into distant woods. Most beautiful is this road in the spring. Stand on the top of Clay Hill, about the beginning or end of May, and you shall see wood after wood, masses of colour, the birches hung with the softest green, and the oak boughs breaking into amber and olive, made doubly bright by the dark gloom of firs, the blackthorn giving place to the sweeter may, and the marigold on the stream to the brighter lily.
On our left lies New Park, now turned into a farm, where in 1670 Charles II. kept a herd of red deer, brought from France, but previously used as a pound for stray cattle. Passing on by a roadside inn with the strange sign of the “Crown and Stirrup,” referring to a pseudo-relic of Rufus’s, preserved at the King’s House, but which is nothing more than a stirrup-iron of the sixteenth century, we reach Lyndhurst—the lime wood,[108] the capital of the Forest, the Linhest of _Domesday_.
William the Conqueror at one time held the manor, in his own hands, dependent on that of Amesbury. Here, after the afforestation, Herbert the Forester held one yardland, on which only two borderers lived, the rest of the manor, which was only two hydes, being thrown into the Forest.[109] Here, also, as at Brockenhurst, was another of the old feudal tenures; for, in the time of Edward I., William-le-Moyne held probably these same two hydes of land, which had been disafforested, by the sergeantry of keeping the door of the King’s larder.[110]
In the village stands the Queen’s House, built in Charles II.’s time, and adjoining it is the Hall where the Courts of Attachment, or Woodmote, the last remnant of the terrible Forest Laws, are regularly held by the verderers, to try all cases of stealing fern and timber.
Close by is the new, half-finished, church, standing in the old churchyard made famous by Mr. Kingsley’s ballad. It is not fair at present to pass a final judgment. When the tower is added, and time shall have touched the walls with a soberer tone, its two great defects will have disappeared, though nothing can remedy the heavy and poverty-stricken window of the north transept with its flattened mullions, and a wretched chimney near the choir utterly spoiling the effect of the beautiful chancel windows.