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upon this Down. Of the rest, over which the plough has passed, some are barely visible, and others are entirely lost.

From this cluster of mounds, then, the hill is named; for churn is evidently cairn-just as churl is identical with carl. The spot is recognised as being emphatically the Hill of the Cairns.

We have thus ample evidence to show that Churn Knob was an important burial-place of the old Celtic tribes. And it would seem that traditions of its ancient sanctity continued to linger about it for a long period. For the story is current that at this spot the Gospel was preached by St Birinus, commonly known as the apostle of Wessex. It may be that the Saxon conquerors had retained the old Celtic sanctuary as a place of assembly for their own religious rites. Or more probably, since they had scarcely held this district sixty years, the remnant of the British race, whose Christianity could not have been forgotten, was sufficient ly strong to render it a favourable spot for the restoration of that faith; for on the opposite range of the Chilterns, just within the last Celtic boundary of Grim's Bank, is Berin's Hill, apparently preserving Birinus's name, as the Berkshire hill preserves the tradition of him.

That name carries us back in the Saxon history some two centuries and a half before the battle of Ashdown. There we saw our Saxon forefathers as a Christian people attacked by heathen Danes. Now we come back to days when the Saxon himself was heathen, and missionaries from other lands were bringing to him the Christian faith. In the south-eastern districts, St Augustine and his companions were the first of these, and they had arrived there at the close

of the sixth century. Their teaching had made good progress in different parts of the country; but the west Saxons were heathen still. Birinus, sent by Pope Honorius, and consecrated bishop by Asterius, the Archbishop of Milan, arrived here in 634, and preached before Cynegils, king of Wessex. Oswald, the Christian king of Northumbria, who had received the Gospel from Celtic teachers in the north, was at the same time a suitor for the hand of the daughter of Cynegils. By this double influence the king was persuaded, and his subjects became Christians with him. Thus Birinus was settled as their bishop, with the whole of Wessex for his diocese; and his Episcopal see was established at Dorchester, in the midst of the valley overlooked by these Downs. The village, with a grand abbeychurch now occupying the site of its cathedral, is hidden behind the British fortress of Sinodun Hill, to which, indeed, it owed its origin; for it appears to have been the camp which the Romans fixed here in order to storm this strong position of the natives. trench of the British earthworks still surrounds the summit of Sinodun, enclosing now a fine clump of trees, which render it the principal object for the eye to rest upon along the course of the winding river. Dorchester necessarily followed the changeful fortunes of this borderland of the West Saxons and the Mercians, sometimes being included in the one and sometimes in the other kingdom. As the seat of the bishopric of Wessex, it became the mother from which sprang the daughter sees of Winchester, Sherborne, and Salisbury; and from Winchester again sprang Wells and Exeter. Afterwards, when Oxfordshire was absorbed in Mercia, this became the chief city

The deep

of the vast midland diocese, from which the churches of Lichfield and Coventry, Hereford and Worcester, sprang; and later still, the centre of the diocese having been transferred to Lincoln in the reign of William Rufus, it became, under Henry VIII., the parent of another bishopric of Oxford.

Nor is Dorchester the only village of this district which was once a city. Three miles farther down the river the white tower of Benson Church may be discerned; and again, just below this, the steeples of Wallingford rise out of a mass of luxuriant elms. Benson had been a British town; but Cuthwin, the brother of Ceawlin, king of Wessex, had wrested it from them in the sixth century. Two centuries later, as we have already seen, it possessed the palace where the king of Wessex reigned, until Cynewulf yielded it to the arms of Offa. Benson Church, a late Norman structure, boasts a relic of those times; for one of its pillars, distinguished from the rest by its massiveness and its clumsy form, evidently contains a portion of the wall of an earlier building encased within it. Wallingford afterwards superseded both Dorchester and Benson as the chief town of the district. It had been an important city of the British tribessome say the capital of the Atrebates, the name of which was variously Latinised as Calleva or Gallena by the Roman conquerors; but, at any rate, a stronghold in which the native race defended themselves against the Saxons on one side, and held the passage of the river against the advancing Angles, so that it became, in the English tongue, the Wallingas' Ford-the Ford of the Welshmen. In 1006 the Danes destroyed it by fire; and sixty years later it was the spot at which William of Nor

mandy passed from Wessex into Mercia, when Wigod, the Saxon lord of the town, became an active servant of the Conqueror. His fortress was then replaced by an extensive Norman castle, in which afterwards the Empress Matilda was besieged by Stephen until her son, Henry II., rescued her. Here in the next age Richard, king of the Normans, the powerful son of King John, had his palace, enriching the town with his royal hospitalities; and in his hands the castle of Wallingford became the rival of that at Windsor in magnitude and splendour. John himself had been known here but too well, and several of the succeeding kings were frequent visitors. Wallingford was in those days a populous town of fourteen parishes. Its castle held out for King Charles after all the rest of Berkshire had yielded; but at last it was taken by Fairfax, and left in ruins. Some bare fragments of its walls bear testimony to the havoc made by the civil wars; while the strength of the ancient town is still to be seen in the line of earthworks which enclose it, and the moat that lies below them. Some parts of the earthworks

are in the private grounds of the present owner of the castle; another part is the public recreation-ground of the town; while the moat is dried on one side, and utilised for tanyards on the other.

And all this long series of histories which the annals of Wallingford represent, is but a sample of the general scene that lies before us as we look from Churn Knob across the valley of the Thames. Close below us the circular eminence of Blewburton Hill, just detached from the range, shows the ridges and terraces of a strong Celtic fortification like Sinodun beyond; and the village of Blewbury

at its foot, like Dorchester at the foot of Sinodun, is evidently the camp from which the Romans attacked the hill. Aston, the Eastune of Saxon times, lies on the eastern slope of the hill; and there is a tradition that Alfred returned thanks for the victory of Ashdown in the Chapel of Aston Upthorpe, where some features of the early Norman or Saxon period still survive in the little modernised edifice. At Upton, on the rising ground west of Blewbury, is another little chapel of the same period, where also it is said that Alfred was a frequent worshipper. Near this village is a spot where the soil is blackened with the burnt remains of a Roman cemetery, and another spot where a number of skeletons were recently found in careless confusion, just as the Pagan Danes may have been buried after the battle when they were scattered and slain "along the whole breadth of the plain of Aescendune." Hagbourne, the haigh or hedged enclosure on the burn or brook, lies at the head of the stream, which, before it enters the Thames, has been turned off at right angles on either side to form a moat round the fortifications of Wallingford. Moreton, or the Moor-town, on one side of this stream, and Cholsey, or Ceol's Isle, on the other side, speak of the time when a wide marsh occupied the lowest portion of this valley. On the rising ground of Ceol's Isle, just outside the village, is the parish church of Cholsey, a noteworthy example of a small Norman minster. A monastery had been founded here in 986 by Ethelred the Unready, in expiation of the murder of Edward the martyr; but twenty years later this was destroyed by the Danes, and lay in ruins until it was given by Henry I. to the abbey which he founded at Reading. The massive

transepts of the church which was then built still retain traces of the arches which opened into their eastern chapels, showing that it originally possessed the peculiar triple arrangement of its east end which belongs to the oriental ritual, and which is often to be met with in the larger churches of the Norman period, before the Latin ceremonial had become dominant in the countries of Western Europe. Blewbury Church also, of somewhat later date, is one of special interest, its fine tower standing as the principal object in the irregular parallelogram of the village. Its medieval worthies are commemorated by some nameless and half-effaced stone effigies for the earlier period, and a good series of sepulchral brasses for the next age. A curious reliquary remains in the wall behind the high altar in the fine vaulted chancel; and a Norman piscina above the chancel arch, showing that one of its numerous altars was erected in the rood-loft, is almost unique.

If we look across into Oxfordshire, the view is bounded by the Chiltern range, and by its offshoot, which stretches out towards Oxford, and ends in Shotover Hill, the château vert of some Norman lord. Just beyond Wallingford, on the wooded slopes at the foot of the Chilterns, is Ewelme, with its picturesque church and almshouses, still standing as they were first built in the fifteenth century by Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, a granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Beside her beautiful tomb is that of her father, Thomas Chaucer, Constable of Wallingford Castle, and Chief Butler of England. In the reign of Henry VI., while her husband was a chief Minister of the Crown, Alice played an important part in public affairs as a supporter of the house of

Lancaster; but when the power of the Red Rose began to fail, she allied herself to the Yorkists. Her son, the successor to the dukedom of Suffolk, married the lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of York, and sister of Edward IV.; and Alice lived to become the grandmother of princes, while the widowed queen who had favoured her, Margaret of Anjou, was imprisoned under her custody at Wallingford, after the wars of the Roses had reversed the fortunes of the two royal houses. In the next age it was to the manorhouse of Ewelme that Henry VIII. is said to have brought Jane Seymour as a bride. Afterwards it was conferred by Edward VI. upon his sister Elizabeth; and while visiting it after her accession to the crown, she rode with Lord Leicester to Aldworth, at the extremity of the Berkshire Downs, to see the famous statues of the family of De la Beche, with which the village church is filled. In Ewelme manor-house also, Prince Rupert lived during the civil wars, while the headquarters of King Charles were at Oxford. And a little way beyond Ewelme is Chiselhampton, where Rupert attempted in vain to cross the long narrow bridge of the Thame brook, which the Parliamentary troops under John Hampden were defending. Beyond this, again, is Chalgrove Field, where a modern monument marks the site of the battle in which, on that same day, John Hampden fell. And in the remote distance, beyond the point where the Chiltern Hills curve away into Buckinghamshire, the village of Great Hampden lies among the beech-woods. It was the patriot's ancestral home, from which he had started on that fatal morning; and its church is the resting-place to which his body

was brought back for burial. Thus, whichever way we look across the valley, the whole picture is filled with history.

The Ridgeway, after taking its direct course behind Churn Knob, rises to the summit of Ilsley Down. But before we follow it, we may notice how the old order of things, here as elsewhere, is ever yielding to the new. Until the other day few portions of the district were wilder or more lonely than the hollow of Blewbury Plain. But now in its very midst the ancient Icknield Street is crossed by a line of metals, and the new railroad from Didcot to Newbury makes its way along the Down. It is destined to become the main line of traffic between the manufacturing district round Birmingham and the seaport of Southampton.

A little farther on, just above East Ilsley, our route is crossed by the turnpike road from Oxford to Newbury. But at the same point where it is crossed at right angles by the turnpike road, it is crossed also at a different angle by one of another character. Like the Ridgeway itself, this other road is here nothing more than a wheeltrack upon the turf. Elsewhere it is a broad green lane between two hedges. Elsewhere, again, it is a well-kept parish road. In another part it is a rough cartroad through the fields. And again, for some distance it has disappeared entirely, and its line is only indicated by a narrow strip of grass beside a hedgerow, just wide enough to walk upon, but without a vestige of a pathway remaining. I have traced the track carefully at different times; and like the Ridgeway, it misses all the villages, and seems to lead through nowhere. It goes between the Ilsleys, between Beedon and Peasemore, between Chieveley and Winterbourne,—

the thorn-woods. And here, again, is the more recent thoroughfare, leading from Oxford, the central city of the district at a later period, to Newbury, an important manufacturing town of the middle ages; and again, a short distance off, there is the modern railway, leading from the busy junction-station of Didcot to the great seaport of Southampton on the southern coast.

touching none of them. But it town among
makes its way direct for Speen, a
village close to Newbury, where
had been an old Roman town, its
name being Spinæ, the Thorns.
The Saxon town which overshad-
owed it was called Newbury, the
New Fort, to distinguish it from
the adjoining old town; and the
intermediate district is Speenham-
land, the Land of the Thorn-dwell-
ing. Speen, then, is the point to
which this ancient road directs
itself.

At the spot of the Downs from
which it starts is a tract called
"The Slad," a Saxon term for a
valley between two hills. It lies
to the north and east of the village
of West Ilsley. And here the
villagers' traditions tell of the ex-
istence of a considerable town in
former times. Pottery and tiles,
bones and oyster-shells, have been
found here in abundance; and the
coins of several emperors, from
Probus to Gratian, are sufficiently
numerous to be known locally as
"Slad farthings." 1 Here the
track of the old road from Speen
rises to the Ridgeway, and is to be
traced down the northern slope;
but below, on the level, it is gone.
The plough has done its work
effectually on Chilton Plain, and
no mark of the road is left. But
its course is unmistakable.
direct line from Speen points straight
across the valley to Sinodun Hill,
which rises in front of Dorchester.

The

What a tale, then, does this group of roadways tell us of the history of our land! Here is one, not quite lost, leading from Dorchester, the citadel of the Roman rulers, where also the first Saxon bishops had their see; and this road passes across to the outlying country settlement of Speen, the

We have passed now above the spot where once stood the famous stables of the Duke of Cumberland's race-horses; and we have passed the training-grounds on the neighbouring slopes, where a string of thoroughbreds is frequently to be seen; and we have passed the curious town of East Ilsley, the sheep-market of the Downs, looking (as a modern writer says) like a little Smithfield on the hillside, with its street running through the sheep-pens. Presently we arrive at Cwichelms-hlaewe, or Cuckamsley Hill. Upon its highest point, beside the Ridgeway, is a tall barrow made of turf cut from the hill. It has been partially destroyed, but until recently its height was some twenty feet, and its circumference four hundred, with a broad trench surrounding its base. Its popular name in the neighbourhood is Scuchamore Knob. The Saxon chronicle relates that in 648, Kenwal, king of the West Saxons, gave three thousand hides of land by Aescendune to his nephew Cuthred, the son of Cwichelm; and it is believed that this barrow is a boundary-mark commemorating the gift. If the grant of land to the son was the result of an agreement previously made with Cwichelm himself, the name of the mound is satisfactorily explained. 2 The

1 Hedges' History of Wallingford, vol. i. pp. 100, 128.
2 Newbury Field-Club, 1870, p. 169.

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