[199]I may seem to exaggerate both here and in the next chapter. I wish that I did. For similar cases in the neighbouring counties of Dorset and Sussex let the reader turn to the words “hag-rod,” “maiden-tree,” and “viary-rings,” in Mr. Barnes’s _Glossary of the Dorset Dialect_; and vol. ii. pp. 266, 269, 270, 278, of Mr. Warter’s _Seaboard and the Down_. I hesitate not to say that superstition in some sort or another is universal throughout England. It assumes different forms: in the higher classes, just at present, of spirit-rapping and table-turning, more gross than even those of the lower; and I am afraid really seems constitutional in our English nature. [200]Of the extreme difficulty of classification of race in the New Forest I am well aware. I have, however, taken such typical families as Purkis, Peckham, Watton, &c., whose names are to be met in every part of the Forest, as my guide. Often, too, certain Forest villages, as Burley and Minestead, though far apart, have a strong connection with each other, and a family relationship may be traced in all the cottages. A good paper was read, touching upon the elements of the New Forest population, by Mr. D. Mackintosh, before the Ethnological Society, April 3rd, 1861. Of the Jute element, which we might have expected from Bede’s account of the large Jute settlement in the Isle of Wight, and Florence of Worcester’s language (as before, ed. Thorpe, vol. i., p. 276), few traces are to be found. See, however, on this point, what Latham says in his _Ethnology of the British Isles_, pp. 238, 239. [201]See Dr. Guest’s paper on “The Early-English Settlements in South Britain,” _Proceedings of the Archæological Institute_, Salisbury volume, 1851, p. 30. [202]This, of course, is not the place to go into so difficult a subject. I need not refer the reader to Mr. Davies’s paper in the _Philological Society’s Transactions_, 1855, p. 210, and M. de Haan Hettema’s _Commentary_ upon it, 1856, p. 196. On the great value of provincialisms, see what Müller has said in _The Science of Language_, pp. 49-59. In Appendix I., I have given a list of some of those of the New Forest, which have never before been noticed in any of the published glossaries. [203]In the charter of confirmation of Baldwin de Redvers to the Conventual House of Christchurch, quoted in Dugdale’s _Monasticon Anglicanum_, vol. iii., part i., p. 304, and by Warner, vol. ii., Appendix, p. 47, it is called Hedenes Buria, which may suggest that the word is only a corruption. I do not for one moment wish to insist on the personal reality of Hengest, but simply to notice the fact of the High-German word for a horse being prominent in the topography of a people whose ancestors used so many High-German words. See Donaldson, _Cambridge Essays_, 1856, pp. 45-48.