But the truth was that the Forest folk cared little about any of these great events. The hunting of deer went on. Despite the numerous attempts of the barons and the Church to reduce the vast areas of the royal forests, the rapacious Plantagenet kings had actually enlarged them so that the boundaries of the New Forest were now even wider than they had been in the Conqueror's time; though the forest laws, mercifully, had grown less harsh. The king no longer made Brockenhurst his main hunting base but usually stayed at the royal manor of Lyndhurst, where the old deer park pale had been greatly enlarged.

One national event had got their attention, though. When Lionheart's brother, bad King John, had been forced by his barons to grant the humiliating Magna Carta, that great charter of English liberties had set out the limits to his oppressions in the Forest. And the matter had been even more clearly stated in a separate Charter of the Forest two years later. This was not a parochial business, either, given that almost a third of England had become royal forest by that date.

And then there had been Beaulieu.

If King John was called bad, it was not only because he lost all his wars and quarrelled with his barons. Worse still, he had insulted the Pope and caused England to be placed under a Papal Interdict. For years there were no church services in the land. No wonder the churchmen and monks hated him - and the monks wrote all the history. As far as they were concerned he had only done one good deed in his life: he had founded Beaulieu.

It was his sole religious foundation. Why did he do it? A good act by a bad man? In monkish chronicles such complexity was usually frowned upon. You were either good or bad. It was generally agreed that he must have done it to pay for some particularly awful deed. One legend even had it that he had ordered some monks to be trampled under his horses' feet and had been haunted afterwards by a dream.