It has, I am aware, been urged that since the Old-English churches were chiefly built of wood, we are not likely to find any ruins. This may be so. But by no process of reasoning can the absence of a thing prove its former presence. Nor need we pay much attention to the argument drawn from such names as Castle Malwood, The Castle near Burley, Castle Hill on the banks of the Avon, Lucas Castle, and Broomy and Thompson Castles in Ashley Walk. If these names prove anything, it is that there were a vast number of castles in the Forest, and very few churches. But Castle Malwood was standing long after the afforestation; whilst the Castle at Burley, and Castle Hill, and the others, were merely earthen fortifications and entrenchments, made by the Kelts and West-Saxons. Nor must we be led away by the few Forest names ending in ton, the Old-English tun, which, after all, means more often only a few scattered homesteads than even a village, still less a town or city, in the modern sense of the word.[1]
- ↑ Mr. Thorpe notices, in his edition of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 94, footnote, its early use, in a document of Eadger's, A.D. 964, in the sense of a town; but in the first place it certainly meant only an inclosed spot. There appears to have been at some time, in the south part of the Forest, a church near Wootton, the Odetune of Domesday, where its memory is still preserved in the name of Church Lytton given to a small plot of ground. Rose, in his notes to the Red King, suggests that Church Moor and Church Place indicate other places of worship. Church Moor is a very unlikely situation, being a large and deep morass, and could well, from its situation, have been nothing else, and, in all probability, takes its name, in quite modern times, from some person. But Church Place at Sloden, like Church Green in Eyeworth Wood, is certainly merely the embankments near which the Romano-British population employed in the Roman potteries, once lived, and which ignorance and superstition have turned into sacred ground. The word Lytton, at Wootton, however, makes the former position certain,
