must have been known surely to our modern historians; but so is the history of England written.  Our real grievance against William was not his afforestation, but his cruel Forest Law, which demanded the limb of a man for the life of a beast, a thing I think unknown in England before his advent.  It was this harsh law, so bitterly resented, which at last, as we may think, cost William Rufus his life.  But the old tale remains, and therefore I was greatly astonished in Boldre Church.

Doubtless the original Norman church consisted of a nave, chancel and north and south aisles.  The south aisle remains, as does the arcade which separates it from the nave.  In the Early English time the north aisle was rebuilt or added, perhaps, for the first time, and the chancel rebuilt.  Later the church was lengthened westward, and the tower built at the eastern end of the Norman aisle.  In that aisle there is a tablet to William Gilpin, the author of “Forest Scenery,” who was vicar of Boldre for a generation, dying in 1804 aged eighty years.  He is buried in the churchyard.

Boldre is certainly a place to linger in, a place that one is sorry to leave, but I could not stay, being intent on Lymington.  Therefore I went down through the oak woods, over Boldre Bridge, to find the high road, which presently brought me past St Austin’s once belonging to the Priory of Christchurch, under Buckland Rings to the very ancient borough of Lymington, with its charming old ivy-clad church tower at the end of the High Street.  The church, in so far as it is old of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has little to boast of, for it has been quite horribly restored.  In the long street of Lymington I slept.

There seemed to be nothing to keep me in Lymington, and therefore, early upon the following morning, I set out for Milford, five miles away by the sea, and there I wonderfully saw the Needles and the great Island and found another Norman church, Norman that is to say in its foundations.  All Saints, Milford, consists to-day of chancel with north and south chapels west of it, transepts, nave with north and south aisles, and a western chapel on either side the western tower, and a south porch.  It is a most beautiful and interesting building.  Doubtless there originally stood here a twelfth-century Norman church, consisting of nave with aisles and chancel, of which two arches remain in the south arcade of the nave.  Then in the thirteenth century the church was rebuilt, as we see it, and very beautiful it is, in its Early English dress, passing into Decorated, in the chancel and transepts.

From Milford, through a whole spring day, I went on by the coast as far I could, westward to Christchurch.  All the way, the sea, the sky, and the view of the island and of Christchurch bay closed by Hengistbury Head in the west, and the long bar on which Hurst Castle stands in the east were worth a king’s ransom.  They say all this coast has strong attractions for the geologist; but what of the poet and painter?  Surely here, when the wind comes over the sea and the Island, showing his teeth, to possess the leaning coast, one may see and understand why England is the England of my heart.  At least I thought so, and lingered there so long that twilight had fallen before I found myself under the darkness of the great Priory of Christchurch, the goal of my desire.