According to the Chroniclers themselves, some rustics living on the spot convey, with a horse and cart, the bleeding body of Rufus to Winchester. According to them[41] also the King, previous to his death, must have feasted, with his retinue of servants, and huntsmen, and priests, and guests, somewhere in the Forest, implying means in the neighbourhood to furnish, if not the luxuries, the necessities of life. In _Domesday_ we find, too, a keeper of the king’s house holding the mill at Efford; also implying, at least, in a very different part of the Forest, a neighbourhood which could not have been quite destitute and deserted.[42] At a later period, when the Forest Laws had reached their climax of oppression, persons in the Forest, as we learn from Blount and the Testa de Nevill, hold their lands at Lyndhurst and Eyeworth,[43] by finding provisions for the king and fodder for his horse. But more than all, _Domesday_, corroborated as it is by the physical characteristics of the country, by the evidence, too, of local names, by the Norman doorways, and pillars and arches at Fawley, and Brockenhurst and Milford, proves most distinctly—and most distinctly because so circumstantially—that the district was neither devastated, nor the houses burnt, nor the churches destroyed, nor the people murdered. Some wrong, though, was doubtless committed: some hardships undergone. Lands, however useless, cannot be afforested without the feelings of the neighbourhood being outraged. And the story, gathering strength in proportion as the Conqueror and his son William the Red were hated by the conquered, at last assumed the tragical form which the Chroniclers have handed down to us, and modern historians repeated. William’s cruelty, however, lay not certainly in afforesting the district: it consisted rather in the systematic way in which he strove to reduce the English into abject slavery; in the fresh tortures with which he loaded the Danish Forest Laws; and in making it far better to kill a man than a deer. For these exactions was it that his family paid the penalty of their lives; and the retribution befel them there, where the superstitious West-Saxon would, above all others, have marked out as the spot fitted for their deaths. [Illustration: View in Gibb’s Hill Wood.] CHAPTER IV. ITS LATER HISTORY. [Illustration: The Millaford Brook. Haliday’s Hill Wood.] We need not dwell so long upon this as the former portion of the History, for in many cases it is nothing but a bare recital of perambulations and Acts of Parliament. The true history of a forest is rather an account of its trees and its flowers and birds, than an historical narrative. Yet even here there are some important facts connected with the nation’s life, and illustrating the character of its kings.