One other occupation has been carried on in the Forest from the earliest times, and still flourishes, at least in the neighbourhood of Lyndhurst. Everybody has heard of Purkess, the charcoal-burner, in whose cart the body of Rufus was conveyed to Winchester. Nearly eight centuries have rolled away since then, and charcoal is still burnt on the same spot and in the same round ovens; but what is even more wonderful, as showing the unchanging habits of the foresters, is that descendants of this same Purkess, or of his family, are still to be found in the woods and in the village of Minestead.
The cottages in the New Forest are beyond the average. There are some miserable dwellings at Beaulieu Rails, belonging to squatters, which are merely mud huts; but elsewhere they are very comfortable. At Beaulieu every cottage in the parish belongs to Lord Henry Scott, and has a living-room, scullery and pantry, and two or three bedrooms, with good water supply and thorough drainage. Each cottage has a pigstye, and at least twenty perches of garden. The rent charged is only a shilling a week; the average rent for a cottage throughout the Forest is £4 per annum.
The appearance of a New Forest cottage, with its warm cosy thatch spreading in all directions, and its old fruit-trees trained over its sides, standing in its own little orchard or garden, is suggestive of comfort. Bees too are largely kept, and find an untold harvest of honey in the heather bells. Bee-keeping is an ancient custom in the Forest; it is recorded in "Doomsday" book that the woods round Eling in those days yielded twelve pounds of honey every year. Mead is still made and drunk, as in old English times. Obviously a pursuit so long continued on one spot will have a folk-lore of its own. Thus we are told in Mr Wise's interesting work on the New Forest, that the drones are here named the "big bees." The straw caps placed over the "bee-pots" are called "bee-hackles," or "bee-hakes," while the entrance to the hive goes by the name of the "tee-hole." Connected, too, with this subject is the old superstition that if a death occurs in the family the bees must be told of it, or else they will leave their hives and never again return.
Nothing sweeter, nothing more charming, can be imagined than the appearance of a New Forest village, seen as I saw Minestead,
