We know, chiefly from geological evidence, that when the Romans came and sailed up what is now Portsmouth Harbour, and cast anchor off the shore at Porchester, they found the southern face of Portsdown Hill as bare of trees as we see it to-day. Mounting to the crest of that imposing range, the legionaries looked down upon a forest that stretched, with few breaks, black and sullen, as far as eye could reach. This interior contained a settlement of the Belgæ at what is now Winchester, and, for the rest, unknown men and beasts; and was only to be penetrated by slow and laborious felling of trees, and clearing of tangled brushwood; while, every now and again, these determined pioneers would be startled by an irruption of ferocious Belgæ (those primitive Frenchmen), who with flint-tipped arrows sent many an invader to his long account. Those stubborn Romans, however, cleared a way, and, indeed, several ways. For, from this Portus Magnus, modern Porchester,--where their original fortress still stands, added to by mediæval builders,--Roman roads were made to Venta Belgarum (Winchester), Regnum (Chichester), and Clausentum, now known as Bitterne. On either side of these roadways to and from their armed camps still stretched the woodlands, and they remained, in greater part, when the Roman power declined and the legions were withdrawn, to give room, in due time, to the invading Saxons. All these hundreds of years the dark recesses of the forest remained practically unknown; but at some safe and convenient distance from the towns of Venta or Regnum--handy for support, and yet sufficiently rural--Roman generals, prefects, and rich merchants erected elaborate villas, whose ruins are even now occasionally discovered by the ploughman as he laboriously turns over the grudging soil of Hants. Hypocausts and elaborate mosaic pavements testify to the comfort and luxury with which they surrounded themselves in those truly spacious days, while abundant traces of their roads remain. It cannot have been until late Saxon times that the site of Petersfield became at all settled, and we first hear of it as a town when William, Earl of Gloucester, conferred a charter upon it, in the dawn of the twelfth century. That ancient document is still in existence, as also is its confirmation by the Countess Hawyse, the Earl's widow in after years; and both these important parchments, together with any number of later documents, were produced in the locally-celebrated Petersfield petition in 1820 against the pretensions of the lord of the manor, who claimed rights over the municipal elections which the worthy burgesses and freeholders of the town successfully resisted.