Transcribed from the 1891 Warren and Son edition by DavidPrice,
Old Times
at Otterbourne.
by
CHARLOTTE M. YONGE.
[secondedition.]
Winchester:
warren and son, printers and publishers, high street.
London:
simpkin and co., limited, stationers’ hall court.
1891
Old Times at Otterbourne.
Not many of us remember Otterbourne before the Railroad, theChurch, or the Penny Post. It may be pleasant to some of usto try to catch a few recollections before all those who can tellus anything about those times are quite gone.
To begin with the first that is known about it, or rather thatis guessed. A part of a Roman road has been traced inOtterbourne Park, and near it was found a piece of a quern, oneof the old stones of a hand mill, such as was used in ancienttimes for grinding corn; so that the place must have beeninhabited at least seventeen hundred years ago. In the lastcentury a medallion bearing the head of a Roman Emperor was foundhere, sixteen feet beneath the surface. It seems to be oneof the medallions that were placed below the Eagle on the RomanStandards, and it is still in the possession of the family ofFitt, of Westley.
After the Roman and British times were over, this part of thecountry belonged to Wessex, the kingdom of the West Saxons, ofwhich Winchester was the capital. Lying so near the chieftown, which was the Bishop’s throne, this place was likelysoon to be made into a parish, when Archbishop Theodore dividedEngland in dioceses and parishes, just twelve hundred years ago,for he died 690. The name no doubt means the village of theOtters, and even now these creatures are sometimes seen in theItchen, so that no doubt there p. 2were once manymore of them. The shapes and sizes of most of our parisheswere fixed by those of the estates of the Lords who first builtthe Church for themselves and their households, with the churlsand serfs on their manor. The first Lord of Otterbournemust have had a very long narrow property, to judge by the formof the parish, which is at least three miles long, and nowhere amile in breadth. Most likely he wanted to secure as much ofthe river and meadow land as he could, with some high open heathyground on the hill as common land where the cattle could graze,and some wood to supply timber and fuel. Probably all theslopes of the hills on each side of the valley of the Otter werecovered with wood. The top of the gravelly hill to thesouthward was all heather and furze, as indeed it is still, andthis reached all the way to Southampton and the Forest. Thewhole district was called Itene or Itchen, like the river. The name meant in the old English language, the Giant’sForest and the Giant’s Wood.
The hill to the north was, as it still remains, chalkdown. The village lay near the river and the st