So began the stirring words of the charter, typical of its kind, by which the lord's small harbour graduated into a little town.

But the feudal lord was nonetheless the borough's lord and its burgesses and mayor, as the reeve was called nowadays, though free, were still his tenants. They still owed him the rents on the plots of land - the burgages - and tenements they occupied. If they made rules, he had the right to approve them. In day-to-day matters of law and order they and their borough were subject to his manor court. And even though, as time went on, the king's courts took over more and more of local justice, the feudal manor of Old Lymington, based on the rural land holding outside the borough, still continued as legal custodian of the place.

For about a century the great events of English history barely touched the place. Around 1300, when King Edward I asked why this borough had failed to supply a vessel for his campaign against the Scots, his commissioners reported back: 'It's a poor little harbour - only a village, really' and they were excused. But the next century saw a dramatic change.

When the terrible Black Death swept across Europe in the years following 1346 it altered the face of England for ever. A third of the population died. Farms, whole villages, were left empty; labour was so scarce that serfs and poor peasants could sell their labour and acquire their own free land. In the great deer forests, with their small populations of woodsmen and huntsmen, there was little to change; but in the eastern half of the New Forest, on the Beaulieu estate, a muted form of the great agricultural revolution did occur. There were no longer enough lay brothers to run the granges. The abbey continued its life of prayer, therefore; its monks actually lived rather well. But instead of running the granges on their huge estates, they mostly let them out, sometimes subdivided, to tenant farmers. Young Jonathan was taken out to one of the granges from time to time to visit his mother's family, who had lived there very comfortably for three generations. When his father pointed eastwards along the coast, he did not say to Jonathan: 'Those are Cistercian lands' but 'that's where your mother's farm lies'. The Beaulieu monks were no longer a special case. They were just another feudal landlord, now.