popular story tells that this is the spot at which Cwichelm was killed in 636 while fighting with an invading king, Edwin of Northumbria, and that the mound marks the place of his burial. But Cwichelm was a convert of Birinus, and doubtless received burial as a Christian; for he had been baptised at Dorchester in the same year as he was killed, and some two years after the baptism of his father Cynegils.

Lowbury Hill spoke to us of Alfred's victory, and of a great turning-point in the history of our English nation. And now Churn Knob and Cwichelm's Hill, reminding us of Birinus and of these early chieftains whom he converted, bring before us a great turningpoint in the history of English Christianity. Here are the Saxon warriors receiving baptism from the missionary who was sent from Rome in the seventh century. But we have seen some reasons for thinking it possible that the ancient British Church of the apostolic age was not quite lost here, when Birinus rekindled the flame; just as when Augustine came to England, his mission was commenced at Canterbury, where he found the court of a Christian queen; and when Cynegils was baptised by Birinus, his godfather was Oswald of Northumberland-for Bede relates that "the king having been catechised, was baptised together with his people, and Oswald, the most holy and victorious king of the Northumbrians, being present, received him as he came forth from baptism, and by an alliance most pleasing and acceptable to God, first adopted him, thus regenerated, for his son, and then took his daughter in marriage." The Christianity of Northumbria, which Oswald represented, owed its origin chiefly to missionaries of the Celtic

Church from Scotland. So we see the two streams of Christianity in our island meeting together, and the primitive Church of Britain becoming incorporated with the newly founded Church of the Saxon conquerors.

After descending somewhat from the high ground of the Cuckamsley Hills, the Ridgeway presently rises again to the western eminences of the Berkshire range. When we have crossed the highroad from Wantage to Hungerford, we come to the fine earthwork now called Letcombe Castle, but anciently known as Sagbury. It is a circular fort, containing nearly twenty-six acres, raised on a lofty projection of the Downs, overlooking Wantage. Some distance farther we come to the similar and still more remarkable camp called Uffington Castle. This is an earthwork of oval form, on the highest point of the entire ridge, nearly 900 feet above the sea-level; so that it is to this western end of the Downs what Lowbury is to the eastern end. Recent examinations of this fortress have revealed the care with which it was constructed. The undisturbed chalk beneath it still retains the holes in which small trunks of trees have been erected in order that these might be connected by wattling to support the earth of the rampart.

At a very short distance from this point, but on lower ground, is another fortified camp called Hardwell Castle; and those who suppose that the Danes were placed on Uffington Castle at the battle of Ashdown, have thought that Hardwell Castle is the spot at which Ethelred and Alfred were encamped against them, as Asser's Chronicle describes it. Antiquaries have attributed to this lower camp a Roman origin, from which we may presume that it was their point

of attack against Uffington Castle. Thus also Wantage had its origin as a camp set against Letcombe Castle, like Dorchester against Sinodun, and Blewbury against Blewburton.

A curious relic of the burial rites of the Romans has been discovered in close proximity to the height which Uffington Castle crowns. A barrow is to be seen there from which many skeletons have been disinterred; and here, as in other places where the Romans buried their dead, a mark of verdigris, caused by a piece of corroded metal, has been noticed upon the teeth in some of the skulls. It was from the coin which had been placed in the mouth as payment to Charon, the spectral ferryman, for conducting the soul across the river of death into the land of the departed.

As we look across the valley from these lofty earthen ramparts, numerous objects of interest may be seen below. Conspicuous among them, here as elsewhere, are the works of the ecclesiastical architects in the middle ages; and Uffington Church demands special notice. Seen from this point just above it, or seen from the Great Western Railway on the other side, it is an object of singular beauty. Its nave and chancel are divided by a tall octagonal tower, and on either side of this is a wellproportioned transept of remarkable design and workmanship. It is a church of which some cathedral cities might be envious. Wantage Church, also, is a massive cruciform structure, towering above the surrounding houses. It covers the last resting-place of the Fitzwaryns, and here is the fine brass of Sir Ivo Fitzwaryn, a warrior at the siege of Nantes, who died in 1414. These towns themselves, also, are as full of interest as their

VOL. CXXXIV.-NO. DCCCXV.

churches. Uffington was the seat of the Uffingas, successors of Uffa the Angle, one of the most powerful of those early chieftains from whose conquests the Mercian kingdom sprang. At Wantage the site of the palace is shown where Alfred was born, the youngest son of Ethelwulf and Osburga, the daughter of Oslac. The site is called the High Garden, and Court Close adjoins it. Alfred bequeathed the manor to his wife Ealswitha for her life, which closed in 904. It then became the property of the Crown again, and apparently was still a royal residence, for a council was held here in 990, by Ethelred the Unready. The manor passed into the hands of the Norman kings; but Cœur de Lion granted it to one of his nobles, and its connection with the Crown was ended. Charles I. passed a night in the parish, during the period when he was occupied in this neighbourhood with the troubles that closed his reign. Probably this was the last royal visit until 1877, when a marble statue of King Alfred, with his cross-marked tunic, and his helmet surrounded by the narrow rim of the Saxon crown, was formally unveiled by the Prince and Princess of Wales in the market-place.

A more famous monument, with which the name of Alfred is commonly connected, is to be seen on the front of the hill which Uffington Castle crowns. This is the White Horse, which gives the title to the adjacent vale. It is cut in the chalk through the green turf of the hillside, where it stands as a prominent landmark, to be seen over all the plain in front of it. A white horse was the well-known ensign of the Saxon chieftains; and the names of Hengist and Horsa, whom tradition represents as the first Saxon invaders of

X

our island, are but two forms of the name of this famous ensign. Wherever the Saxons went, their horse-standard was planted. It

was to them what the eagle was to the Romans of the Empire, and what we understand by the British lion. There are others of these white horses upon other Downs besides this in Berkshire, and they are commonly supposed to be of Saxon workmanship. This is of course King Alfred's; and some writers have been still more specific, saying that it was cut by him to commemorate the battle of Ashdown. But it hardly needs a critical historian to decide that at that period Alfred's followers must have been otherwise employed, and that such a work as this was not likely to have been undertaken by him at any period of his busy and eventful life. It was doubtless designed for other purposes than the mere commemoration of a victory. And indeed antiquarians produce strong reasons for believing that the White Horse belongs altogether to an earlier age, and that the Saxons saw it here on their arrival as we see it

now.

For, first, you may see on other Downs, though not in Berkshire, great human figures similarly cut in the turf of the hillside. One such is conspicuous upon the Sussex Downs, as you pass along the railway between Lewes and Eastbourne. It is found in just such a curved hollow as this which the White Horse occupies at Uffington. The Berkshire men scour the White Horse from time to time, and many are the gay scenes that have been known at the scouring. Most readers are familiar with the descriptions, preserved by a popular writer, both of the old customs which formerly prevailed on such occasions, and of their revival in recent times. But the human

figure in Sussex came into the hands of a proprietor of different tastes, who saved the need of all further scouring by having him once for all paved out with white bricks. What, then, are these human figures, and what light does their history throw upon the horsefigures?

6

Cæsar, describing the worship of the Druids and their human sacrifices, writes as follows: "Some have images of immense size [immani magnitudine], whose limbs are woven with boughs and filled with living men, to which they set fire, and the men are overcome by the flame and killed." This has been commonly understood to mean that the image itself was a wicker cage, into which a mass of human beings were packed together. We have read in an English History for Children' that "the Britons were very cruel to their enemies; they used to make a great wicker figure of an idol, to fill it with their captives, and then to burn them all together." A grotesque delineation of the subject may be seen in the Saturday Magazine' of August 1832, where the effigy is some five times the height of the presiding Druid. Each leg contains at least a score of victims, and the body a proportionately larger number; while each arm dangles from the shoulder, filled with a dozen more. A man upon a ladder has assisted a female to climb into one of the thighs, when he closes a wicker door upon her. The monstrous head which surmounts the whole is apparently supposed to be of solid woodwork. But setting aside all such exaggerations, it does not appear how such a wicker image, immense size," could be made to stand, or how, if it stood, it could be made to burn. Nor is it evi

"of

dent why they should wish to burn up their god as well as his victims. There is only one way in which the barbarous people of whom Cæsar writes could have made figures "of immense size," and that is by cutting them out upon the hills. Then it is possible that the historian's account is accurate, and that human beings may have been caged down in wicker-work upon them, and fuel may have been added for the burning of the victims. It is more probable, however, that Cæsar takes his account from an informant whom he has misunderstood, and that the cages of victims were set upon the level ground in front of the idol. In any case, the hill figures are doubtless the idols which are thus described, and they were therefore the work of the Briton before the coming of the Romans.

It is an obvious presumption that the horse figures and the human figures are the work of one and the same people. And this, again, is confirmed. For it has been pointed out that the White Horse has its wrong leg foremost, unlike the familiar Saxon ensign, and is in fact represented in an impossible position. But there is a rare and famous gold coin of Cunobeline, the British king who reigned in this district before the invasion of Aulus Plautius in the year 43; and that coin is marked with the figure of a horse in exactly the same posture as this upon the hills. It is hardly necessary to add that the horse was the common ensign of the Celtic race which had previously invaded the land, as well as of their remote Saxon kinsmen.

We descend by the Giant's Stairs, and look at the horse's manger, a natural hollow in the

hill below him. Close to this is the Dragon's Hill, which might be mistaken for an artificial eminence, but it has merely been shaped in ancient times into the appearance of a large sepulchral barrow, and may have been used for some chieftain's burial. The grass will never grow on the side where the dragon's blood flowed down. For

"If it be true, as I've heard say, King George did here the dragon slay; And down below, on yonder hill, They buried him, as I've heard tell." So sang Job Cork, "an Uffington man of two generations back, who was a shepherd on White Horse Hill for fifty years."1 But they say it is really Pendragon's Hill; and Pendragon means a chief of kings. So names are changed, and myth becomes mixed with legend. We are back, therefore, in the remotest ages of the old occupants of Britain, almost as far removed from Alfred as Alfred is from us.

At the foot of this portion of the hills, close to the neighbouring village of Kingston Lisle, stands the famous Blowing Stone. It is now placed under an elmtree in front of a wayside inn; but tradition says, and no doubt with truth, that once its place was on the summit of the Downs. The stone is about three feet in height, pierced with several natural holes ; and one of these holes is of such a form that when strong and practised lungs blow into it, the sound is like that of a loud trumpet, and may be heard some miles away. Everything here is called King Alfred's; and accordingly this is his bugle - horn. But no doubt, long before Alfred's time, it was a useful instrument for summoning the families of the district together in sudden dangers or emer

gencies; and many, we may be sure, have been the exciting scenes that have followed upon the loud sounding of this marvellous stony trumpet.

Nor is this the only stone in these parts around which old traditions linger. If we pass on upon the Ridgeway a mile beyond Uf fington Castle, we come to Wayland Smith's cave near the Wiltshire border. In a small copse of the undisturbed primeval forest you may trace the outline of what has been a circle of large upright stones, though most of them are now fallen, and many are carried away. In the centre is a large flat stone raised upon three others, some four feet from the ground, and a passage of upright stones leads to the western side, which is open. It is said to be a Danish work, and tradition calls it the burial-place of Bæcsceg, the Danish king who fell at Ashdown. But it is one of those cromlechs which are very rare in these parts of England, and much more common in the north and west, where the remnant of the Britons lingered. Moreover, it was already known as Weland's Smithy less than a century after the battle of Ashdown, for it is referred to under that name as a recognised landmark in a charter of King Eadred in the year 955.

The old legend was, that a mysterious being, Wayland the Smith, had his forge here, and made the shoes for the sacred horse upon the hill above it. Then there was a story that if a traveller upon the Ridgeway required a shoe for his horse, he had but to tie him to a stone of the circle and place a sixpence on the flat stone, and after he had turned away for ten minutes, he would find the animal duly shod by this superhuman farrier who lived below. Sir Wal

ter Scott introduces, in one of his best novels, the story of a blacksmith in the neighbourhood hiding himself in the cavern, and actually carrying out the letter of the legend. But Weland was the name of a Scandinavian deity. In their ancient Sagas he makes the arms for the heroes, as Hephæstus for the gods and warriors in Homer. And Sir Walter Scott's note explains how the popular belief may have arisen from a legend of the Duergar, the spirits of the rocks, who were workers in steel and iron. From such materials as these, no doubt, the story was created. Here is a strange mysterious-looking place in a lonely spot of the Downs, and naturally it was supposed to belong to Wayland. And it was the only spot of the neighbourhood marked by large stones. Hence the old myth of the goblin iron-smiths of the rocks gathered round it, and out of this grew the legend. I should not be surprised if anciently there were some dim memories of human sacrifices offered upon the upper stone, and current reports of the victims' spirits haunting the circle, to help out the belief that the strange cromlech formed an trance into the under world. And it shows us picture upon picture of our old island's histories. Here are the stones collected with infinite labour from different parts of the surrounding Downs, and reared with no less labour to form a temple of primeval worship, with its flat central altar and its entrance - passage and surrounding wall of upright pillars, a miniature of the great works of Stonehenge and Avebury in the adjoining county-but in this district it was of the very best that human skill could dedicate; and near it the great White Horse idol; and near it also the Blowing Stone

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