wards, the West-Saxons watched the raven-standard of the Danes scouring down the Channel, and knew their course along the coast, at night, by the blaze of burning villages, and, in the day, by the black trail of smoke.[1]
But to return to the town. Its Old-English names, Tweonea and Twinham-burn, were given to it from its situation between the rivers Avon and Stour. They were afterwards corrupted into the Norman Thuinam; which was lost in the name of its Priory, which overshadowed the town with its magnificence.
Here, in 901, came Æthelwald the Ætheling, son of Æthered, in his rebellion against his cousin Edward the Elder, and seized the place. From Christchurch he fell back upon Wimborne, which he fortified, exclaiming he would do one of two things, "Either there live, or there lie." That same night he fled to Northumberland.[2]
From Domesday we find that in Edward the Confessor's time the manor belonged to the Crown, and that thirty-one tenements paid a yearly tax of 16d. and a mill 5s, whilst another, belonging to the Church, was worth but 30d. Its woods, only, were enclosed in the Forest.
The manor remained in the hands of the Crown till Henry I. bestowed it on his friend and kinsman Richard de Redvers, Earl of Devon, the ruins of whose castle still overlook the Avon. Here his son Baldwin de Redvers in vain fortified himself
- ↑ Gibson, in his edition of The Chronicle—in the "nominum locorum explicatio," p. 50, seems to think that Yttingaford, where peace was made between the Danes and Edward, was somewhere in the New Forest, deriving the word from Ytene, the old name of the district. Mr. Thorpe, however, in his translation of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 77, suggests that it may be Hitchen.
- ↑ The Chronicle, Ed. Thorpe, vol. i. p. 178. Florence of Worcester, Ed. Thorpe, vol. i. pp. 117, 118.
