the time when the district of Ytene became the New Forest. Probably
the king was able to ride over down, heather, and wood, scarcely
meeting an enclosure the whole way from Winchester; and we can
understand his impatience of the squatters in the wilder parts,
though the Cistercian Abbey of Beaulieu was yet to be founded.
Indeed Professor E. A. Freeman does not accept the statement that
there could possibly have been thirty-nine village churches to be
destroyed in the whole district of "Ytene."

The tradition lingered to the present time at Otterbourne that the
corpse of William Rufus was brought back in Purkiss's wood-cart from
Minestead to Winchester for burial in the Cathedral, along a track
leading from Hursley to Otterbourne, called at each end King's Lane,
though it is not easy to see how the route could have lain through
both points.

The parish of Hursley lies in the hundred of Buddlesgate, and
division of Fawley; and the village is situated on the turnpike-road
leading from Winchester to Romsey, and nearly at an equal distance
from each of those places.

The parishes by which Hursley is surrounded were, when Mr. Marsh
wrote, Sparsholt on the north; Farley on the north-west; Michelmersh
and Romsey on the west; Baddesley, North Stoneham, and Otterbourne on
the south; and Compton and St. Cross on the east.

The whole parish was then upwards of twenty-eight miles in
circumference, and contained 10,590 acres of land, of which 2600 were
in common, 372 in roads and lanes, about 1000 under growth of
coppice-wood, and the rest either arable or pasture.