The New Forest coven were an alleged group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s. According to his own claims, in September 1939, a British occultist named Gerald Gardner was initiated into the coven, and subsequently used its beliefs and practices as a basis from which he formed the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca. Gardner described some of his experiences with the coven in his published books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), although on the whole revealed little about it, saying he was respecting the privacy of its members. Meanwhile, another occultist, Louis Wilkinson, corroborated Gardner's claims by revealing in an interview with the writer Francis X. King that he too had encountered the coven, and expanded on some of the information that Gardner had provided about them.