Excerpt from A History of Hampshire: Including the Isle of Wight A considerable part of the land in the south of the county rests on a substratum of gravel which keeps the soil dry, and has in modern times assisted in attracting a large residential population. Its landlocked harbours, its double tides in South ampton Water, an estuary which stretches into the interior of the land, and leads into the long valleys of the Test and the Itchen, and the many eligible sites for occupation, must have invited settlements at as early a period as any part of Britain. The materials for the History of Hampshire are more abundant than those of most English counties, as will be seen in the following pages. No county offers a richer field for the study of prehistoric or medieval archaeology. A peculiarity in its history is the great part it has played in national history, and especially during the Saxon and Norman periods. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.