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.
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