So greatly has the Forest been reduced in size, that Brockenhurst, once nearly its centre, is now only a border village. Its Old-English name (the badger’s wood), like that of Everton, the wild-boar place, on the southern side of the Forest, tells its own story. It consists of one long straggling street, and a few scattered houses, with one or two village inns. Much of its wildness has been spoilt by the railroad; and in consequence, too, of the adjoining manor of Brockenhurst, it appears even less than it really is in the Forest. Still, however, if the reader wishes to see the Forest woods and heaths towards the south, let him come here, and the village accommodation will only give an additional charm to the scenery. I, for my part, do not know that a clean English village inn, with its sanded floor, and its best parlour kept for state occasions, makes such bad quarters. It is a real pleasure to find some spots on the earth not yet disfigured by fashionable hotels.
At Brockenhurst existed one of those tenures of knight-service once so common throughout England. Here Peter Spelman, an ancestor of the antiquary, held a carucate of land by the service of finding for Edward II. an esquire clad in coat of mail for forty days in the year, and whenever the King came to the village to hunt, litter for his bed, and hay for his horse, which last clause will give us some insight into the often rough living and habits of the fourteenth century.[102] Here, too, not many years ago, droves of deer would at night, when all was still, race up the village street, and the village dogs leap out and kill them, or chase them back to the Forest.
The church, one of the only two in the Forest mentioned in _Domesday_,[103] is built on an artificial mound on the top of a hill, a little way out of the village, so that it might serve as a landmark in the Forest.[104] The church has been sadly mutilated. A wretched brick tower has been patched on at the west end; and on the north side a new staring red brick aisle, which surpasses even the usual standard of ugliness of a dissenting chapel. On the south side stands the Norman doorway, with plain escalloped capitals, and an outside arch ornamented with the indented and chevron mouldings. The chancel is Early-English, whilst the plain chancel arch which springs without even an impost from the wall, is very early Norman. Under one of the chancel windows rises the arch of an Easter sepulchre, whilst a square Norman font, of black Purbeck marble, stands at the south-west end of the nave.