Probably Canute, who had his capital at Winchester, and was much at Southampton, had a chase here, for he, like Norman William, was a mighty hunter, as the stringency of his forest laws testifies. Regarding the size and nature of the district, neither churches nor villages could have been much more numerous than at the present day, and as some of the former, still standing, are mentioned in "Domesday Book", the wholesale destruction of the old Chronicles must have been grossly exaggerated. When William annexed the district to the Crown, he most likely chose it because the greater part was wild already, and the afforestation simply meant that he placed it under forest law with a separate administration. Cases of hardship there doubtless were; though there is record of compensation being paid to some dispossessed owners, the smaller men may have suffered, and these being Saxons, bitter feeling against the Conqueror was engendered, and as time went on tales of cruelty grew to legends, especially after the violent deaths of William's sons in the forest, held by the common people to be the judgment of God.
The whole tract taken by the king was about the size of the Isle of Wight, a triangle, roughly speaking, lying between Southampton Water on the east and the River Avon on the west, its base being the Solent shore, and its apex running up into Wiltshire at Nomansland. Since then its boundaries have been narrowed, passing a mile or two within Southampton Water, from Cadnam through Dibden Purlieu, touching the Solent at Stone Point and leaving it again at Pitt's Deep, cutting the Lymington Road at Passford, and going by Meadend Bridge round by the Avon Valley, along the rampart of high down to Breamore, where it joins the old northern border. It has been further diminished by the grant of manors to private owners and to Beaulieu Abbey, and by encroachments of various sorts.
To the town-dweller forest usually bears the prime signification of trees; he thinks of a forest as a wood of large extent, interrupted possibly by an occasional clearing: to the forester it means a great tract of moorland, holding in its bosom many wooded enclosures, many "lawns", as he calls the lightly wooded slopes, many long, marshy "bottoms" or valleys dividing the heaths. The dictionary meaning is just open ground reserved for the chase, and the derivation is given as _foras_: out of doors.