Where the labour of man has ceased, vegetation soon asserts her empire, and fields, when left to themselves, become, according to their soil, either wild or stony, or else covered with a dense growth of underwood, and tall trees. Such was the case over the wide expanse which had been rendered desolate; the spaces of common ground, with golden blossomed gorse and wild thyme, continued such as they had been, but trees grew thick and fast, the beautiful groves became woods in the course of a short time, and the once cultivated country was rapidly absorbed in the wilderness portions of Ytchtene. A vast forest darkened the land, and all trace of ruined homes and dismantled churches disappeared in many parts, while in others, either the line of erections might be traced by the elevation of the soil, or else large blocks of stone, and here and there a broken arch, or doorway, long pointed out the site of a church or castle. Names, too, are even now retained, with the recollection of their own sad histories. Church-place and Church-moore seems to mark the solitary spots as the sites of ancient buildings, where the Anglo-Saxons worshipped and dwelt in peace, before the stern decree of the unrelenting conqueror razed the sacred edifices. Thompson's Castle recalls to mind, the cheerfulness and hospitality that presided in an ancestral hall, while the termination of _ham_ and _ton_, annexed to many of the woodlands, may be taken as an evidence that where innumerable boughs are waving, a thronging population once inhabited. The memorial-tree, which now stands lone and seamed, was then a sapling, for such we may conjecture to have been the case, according to the well-known longevity of forest-trees. Three events of great interest are associated with it--the making desolate a wide extent of country; the death of the proud Norman, by whose command the work of ruin was achieved; and the untimely end of his successor. Had the history of William I. been written with reference to his private actions, it might be noticed that a tissue of domestic sorrows succeeded to the laying desolate of Ytchtene. His wife Matilda died a few years after, and his fair daughter Gundreda, the cherished one in her father's house, was cut off in the flower of her youth. He saw with grief the jealousy that subsisted between his sons William and Henry, and during the time that Duke Robert, his first-born, continued an exile and a fugitive, Richard, his second son, was gored to death by a stag, as he was hunting over the wide expanse which his father had depopulated. Men spoke of the sad event as a just punishment on him who had respected neither the lives nor feelings of those who once had dwelt there. Some said, this is but one; we shall see others of his family to whom the forest will prove fatal, and they spoke true.