| Waltham Chase |
| The meaning of Chase or as it is
sometimes spelt, Chace means a piece of land that was reserved by the
Crown or a local Lord for the purpose of hunting, and when the Bishops
Palace at Waltham was finished during the 12th century Waltham chase was
a favourite hunting ground for the bishops. It started at Waltham Park
and went south and east to the Forest of Bere at Soberton and covered a
far larger area than the present village of Waltham Chase which was
formerly of Droxford parish and is now in the parish of Shedfield. In the 18th century the Waltham Blacks were started, these were men with blackened faces and wore disguises to poach and they later even robbed coaches, and Bishop Trimmel urged Parliament in 1722 to pass a Black Act in which hundreds of offences were listed and many of these carried the death penalty, A gibbet was put up where the Triangle Recreation Ground is now. There is talk that the gibbet was used on various occasions but the Black Act was not called into use. The Waltham Blacks it is thought were started because the villagers were fed up with all the damage the deer were doing to their crops, and in 1742 Bishop Hoadley was asked to restock the Chase with more deer but he refused due to the harm that they had already caused. The Chase as mentioned above was enclosed with Droxford Parish in 1855 and a sawmill was built in Brooklyn Meadow as the forest was gradually being cut down, today the saw mill has gone and instead there are residential properties. Waltham Chase was one of those places that saw a tremendous increase in the growth of housing from the 1940s and a lot of the land that was famed for its fruit growing has now got huge housing estates built on it.
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