wy uplands.

The "New" Forest was first so called by the Conqueror. He brought
within its bounds certain tracts that had been preserved by his
predecessors, but that he "burnt and razed whole villages, and
converted a smiling countryside into a wild place devoted to the
king's pleasure" is extremely improbable, unless we may credit William
with an altruistic care for the sport of his great-grandchildren at
the expense of whatever little popularity he may have had in his own
time. Undoubtedly the folk of this part of Hampshire felt aggrieved at
losing their rights over a great stretch of wild common where the more
democratic Saxon kings had taken their pleasure without interfering
with the privileges of the churl. That certain small settlements were
at some time abandoned is attested by names such as Bochampton,
Tachbury, Church Walk, etc., and it is said that Rufus established
certain dispossessed peasantry in far-off portions of his kingdom. The
Conqueror's immediate successors made cruel and arbitrary laws, in
connexion with the preservation of the deer, that were much mitigated
by the Forest Charter of 1217 which provided that death should no
longer be the penalty for killing the King's deer, but merely a fine,
or imprisonment in default.

The wild life of the Forest is much the same as that of the remoter
parts of rural England, apart from the ponies and the deer. Of the
latter only a few still roam the glades. An Act was passed in 1851 for
their removal, when the number was reduced from nearly 4,000 to about
250 of two kinds--fallow deer and red deer. Latterly roe deer have
appeared, adventurers from Milton Abbey park. The New Forest pony was
a distinct breed and the writer has been told that it was the
descendant of a small native horse, but its characteristics have been
lost through scientific crossing with alien breeds. A legend used to
be current in the Forest that the ponies were descended from those
landed from the wrecked ships of the Spanish Armada, but there is a
limit to what we may believe of this wonderful fleet. Most villages
along the south coast having rather more than the usual proportion of
dark-haired folk have been claimed as asylums for the castaway sailors
and soldiers of Spain by enthusiastic amateur anthropologists.

Before breaking-in, the Forest pony is a wild and often vicious little
beast--more so, perhaps, than its cousins of Wales and Dartmoor--and a
"drive," when the little horses a