Note 32 — Chapter III · ITS EARLY HISTORY.

Mr. Thorpe notices, in his edition of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 94, foot-note, its early use, in a document of Eadger’s, A.D. 964, in the sense of a town; but in the first place it certainly meant only an inclosed spot. There appears to have been at some time, in the south part of the Forest, a church near Wootton, the Odetune of Domesday, where its memory is still preserved in the name of Church Lytton given to a small plot of ground. Rose, in his notes to the Red King, p. 205, suggests that Church Moor and Church Place indicate other places of worship. Church Moor is a very unlikely situation, being a large and deep morass, and could well, from its situation, have been nothing else, and, in all probability, takes its name, in quite modern times, from some person. But Church Place at Sloden, like Church Green in Eyeworth Wood, is certainly merely the embankments near which the Romano-British population employed in the Roman potteries, once lived, and which ignorance and superstition have turned into sacred ground. The word Lytton, at Wootton, however, makes the former position certain, but by no means necessitates that the church was standing at the afforestation. Thus we know that in Leland’s time a chapel was in existence at Fritham (Itinerary, ed. Hearne, vol. vi. f. 100, p. 88), which has since his day disappeared. It would, of course, be absurd to argue that all ruins which have been, or yet may be found, were caused by the Conqueror. Further, with regard to the castles, had there been any, they would most certainly have been noticed in Domesday, and it is most unlikely, knowing how very few existed in England at the Conquest, that five or six should have been clustered together in the Forest. The fact, too, of Rose’s finding “minute fragments of brick and mortar,” lumps of chalk, and pieces of slate bored with holes, simply proves that persons have, subsequently to the Normans, found the New Forest a most ungrateful soil. I may, perhaps, add that Mr Akerman, the well-known archæologist, when, a few years since, exploring the Roman potteries in the Forest (for which see chapter xvii.), in vain tried there, or in other parts, to find any traces of old buildings. (Archæologia, vol. xxxv. p. 97.)