One authority claims 95,000 acres as the extent of the Forest.  The present writer would increase this estimate considerably.  About two-thirds of the more central portion are crown lands, and as will be seen by the most superficial view (from the afore-mentioned express train for instance) much of the central woodland is interspersed with farms and arable land and a large extent of open heath, as are those outlying fringes in the Avon valley and elsewhere.  It is unaccountable that the word “forest” should have so altered in meaning during the course of centuries that its earlier significance has almost become lost.  The word is associated in every one’s mind with the density of tropical foliage or the dark grandeur of northern fir woods.  Forest as a topographical suffix denotes a wild uncultivated tract of hilly or common land, more often than not quite bare of trees.  The great expanse of Radnor Forest is well known to the writer and not even a thorn bush comes to the mind in picturing its miles of fern-clad billowy 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.