The masters of the world have left us few traces of their possession,
and in fact the whole district was probably scarcely inhabited; but
the trees and brushwood or heather of the southern country would have
joined the chalk downs, making part of what the West Saxons called
the Jotunwald, or Giant's Wood, and the river Ytene, and so Itchen
seems to have been named in like manner.

These were the times when churches were built and the boundaries of
estates became those of parishes. The manor of Merdon, which
occupied the whole parish of Hursley, belonged to the Bishops of
Winchester by a grant of Oynegils, first Christian King. Milner, in
his History of Winchester, wishes to bestow on Merdon the
questionable honour of having been the place where, in the year 754,
the West Saxon King Cenwulf was murdered by his brother in the house
of his lady-love; but Mr. Marsh, the historian of Hursley, proves at
some length that Merton in Surrey was more likely to have been the
scene of the tragedy.

Church property being exempted from William the Conqueror's great
survey, neither Merdon nor Hursley appears in Domesday Book, though
Otterbourne, and even the hundred of Boyate or Boviate, as it is in
the book, appear there. It had once belonged, as did Baddesley
first, at first to one named Chepney, then to Roger de Mortimer, that
fierce Norman warrior who was at first a friend and afterwards an
enemy to William I.

The entire district, except the neighbourhood of Merdon Manor on the
one hand, and of the Itchen on the other, was probably either forest
ground or downs, but it escaped the being put under forest laws at