At Brockenhurst existed one of those tenures of knight-service once so common throughout England. Here Peter Spelman, an ancestor of the antiquary, held a carucate of land by the service of finding for Edward II. an esquire clad in coat of mail for forty days in the year, and whenever the King came to the village to hunt, litter for his bed, and hay for his horse, which last clause will give us some insight into the often rough living and habits of the fourteenth century.[102] Here, too, not many years ago, droves of deer would at night, when all was still, race up the village street, and the village dogs leap out and kill them, or chase them back to the Forest. The church, one of the only two in the Forest mentioned in _Domesday_,[103] is built on an artificial mound on the top of a hill, a little way out of the village, so that it might serve as a landmark in the Forest.[104] The church has been sadly mutilated. A wretched brick tower has been patched on at the west end; and on the north side a new staring red brick aisle, which surpasses even the usual standard of ugliness of a dissenting chapel. On the south side stands the Norman doorway, with plain escalloped capitals, and an outside arch ornamented with the indented and chevron mouldings. The chancel is Early-English, whilst the plain chancel arch which springs without even an impost from the wall, is very early Norman. Under one of the chancel windows rises the arch of an Easter sepulchre, whilst a square Norman font, of black Purbeck marble, stands at the south-west end of the nave. If the church, however, has been disfigured, the approach to it fortunately remains in all its beauty. For a piece of quiet English scenery nothing can exceed this. A deep lane, its banks a garden of ferns, its hedge matted with honeysuckle, and woven together with bryony, runs, winding along a side space of green, to the latch-gate, guarded by an enormous oak, its limbs now fast decaying, its rough bark grey with the perpetual snow of lichens, and here and there burnished with soft streaks of russet-coloured moss; whilst behind it, in the churchyard, spreads the gloom of a yew, which, from the Conqueror’s day, to this hour, has darkened the graves of generations.[105] But the charm of Brockenhurst, as of all the Forest villages, consists in the Forest itself. To the north runs the small Forest stream, blossomed over in the summer with water-lilies. On the left lies Black Knoll, with its waste of heath and gorse, running up to the young plantations of New Park. On the right, Balmor Lawn, with its short, sweet turf, where herds of cattle are pasturing, stretches away to Holland’s Wood, with old thorns scattered here and there, in the spring lighting up the Forest with their white may.