I have said that the Wood-Hall, or Hall in the Wood, must have been sufficiently important to give its name to the demesne. It may be doubted, however, whether the name Woodhall has always applied to the whole parish, now so called. In Camden’s “Britannia,” written about 1586, Gibson’s Edition being 1695, although the names of all the adjoining parishes appear in his map, that of Woodhall is absent, {127} and in its place we find “Buckland.” This latter name still survives in “Buckland lane,” given in the Award Map, in the north of the parish, and near to which, within the writer’s memory, there remained a tract of waste, and wild woodland. This name, therefore, is interesting, as indicating the former presence of the wild deer in our neighbourhood. It is, as it were, the still uneffaced “slot” of the roaming stag,—a footprint in the sand of time, still visible. And, since this Buckland lane leads to nowhere beyond itself, we may well imagine it to have been a sort of _cul-de-sac_, a sylvan retreat, in which especially the antlered herds did congregate from the larger wood of the Manor Hall; and, in connection with this, we may notice that, not far from this lane, there still remain two woods, named Dar-wood, which may be taken, by an easy transition, to represent Deer-wood; further indicating the wild forest character of the demesne. Buckland lane terminates at a small enclosure, now known, for some unrecorded reason, as “America,” the sole plot of land, besides the churchyard, remaining in the parish attached to the church. The modern incumbent may indulge his fancy by supposing that, notwithstanding the strict monastic rule, this bit of church land may, in the olden day, occasionally have furnished a “fatte buck” for the table of the lordly Abbot of Kirkstead. {128a} In the Liber Regis, or King’s Book, issued by Commissioners under Henry VIII., the benefice is called Wood Hall; but it would seem, from what has been given above, that it was not until a later period that the whole Civil Parish became known by that name. There is nothing to show who were the occupants of this Wood Hall, but, until the Reformation, they probably held it in fee from the Abbots of Kirkstead. One little evidence of the connection with the great religious house survived, till within the last few years, in the Holy Thistle (Carduus Marianus), which grew in an adjoining field, as it also did about the ruin of Kirkstead Abbey, but it is now, it is believed, extinct. The monks found an innocent recreation in gardening, but they are gone, and even their plants have followed them.