hem. The shapes
and sizes of most of our parishes were fixed by those of the estates of
the Lords who first built the Church for themselves and their households,
with the churls and serfs on their manor. The first Lord of Otterbourne
must have had a very long narrow property, to judge by the form of the
parish, which is at least three miles long, and nowhere a mile in
breadth. Most likely he wanted to secure as much of the river and meadow
land as he could, with some high open heathy ground on the hill as common
land where the cattle could graze, and some wood to supply timber and
fuel. Probably all the slopes of the hills on each side of the valley of
the Otter were covered with wood. The top of the gravelly hill to the
southward was all heather and furze, as indeed it is still, and this
reached all the way to Southampton and the Forest. The whole district
was called Itene or Itchen, like the river. The name meant in the old
English language, the Giant's Forest and the Giant's Wood.

The hill to the north was, as it still remains, chalk down. The village
lay near the river and the stream that runs into it, upon the bed of clay
between the chalk and the gravel. Most likely the Moathouse was then in
existence, though a very different building from what it is at present,
and its moat very deep and full of water, serving as a real defence.
There is nothing left but broad hedge rows of the woods to the
north-east, but one of these is called Dane Lane, and is said to be the
road by which the Danes made their way to Winchester, being then a
woodland path. It is said that whenever the yellow cow wheat grows
freely the land has never been cultivated.

There was a hamlet at Boyatt, for both it and Otterbourne are mentioned
in Domesday Book. This is the great census that William the Conqueror
caused to be taken 1083 of all his kingdom. From it we learn that
Otterbourne had a Church which belonged to Roger de Montgomery, a great
Norman baron, whose father had been a friend of William I.

Well for the parish that it lay at a distance from the Giant's Wood,
where the King turned out all the inhabitants for the sake of his "high
deer," making it the New Forest. He and his sons could ride through down
and heath all the way to their hunting. We all know how William Rufus
was brought back from his last hunt, lying dead in the charcoal burner
Purkis's cart, in which he was carried to his grave in Winchester
Cathedral. Pa