126 MYTHICAL ACCOUNT OF STONEHENGE. 



lously set them up ; and similar stones, erected in a like 

 manner, are to be seen there at this day. These stones 

 (according to the British history) Aurelius Arnbrosius, king 

 of the Britons, procured Merlin, by supernatural means, to 

 bring from Ireland into Britain. And that he might leave 

 some famous monument of so great a treason to future ages, 

 in the same order and art as they stood formerly, set them 

 up where the flower of the British nation fell by the cut- 

 throat practice of the Saxons, and where, under the pretence 

 of peace, the ill-secured youth of the kingdom, by murderous 

 designs, were slain." 



This account is clearly mythical. The larger stones were 

 evidently obtained in the neighbourhood, and are in fact 

 " Sarcens," identical with those which occur in hundreds on 

 Salisbury Plain. Moreover, the very name of Stonehenge, 

 like those of Stanton Drew, Stennis, etc., seems to me a very 

 strong argument against those who attribute these monuments 



o o o 



to so recent an origin. Stanton Drew, for instance, is " The 

 Stone Town of the Druids." How could it have been called 

 so if it was erected in Saxon times ? Stonehenge is generally 

 considered to mean the Hanging-stones, as indeed was long 

 ago suggested by Wace, an Anglo-Norman poet, who says : 



Stanhengues ont nom en Englois 

 Pieres pandues en Francois ; t 



but it is surely more natural to derive the last syllable from 

 the Anglo-Saxon word " ing," a field ; as we have Keston, 

 originally Kyst-stan-ing, the field of stone coffins. \Yhat 

 more natural than that a new race, finding this maoriificent 



' O O 



ruin standing in solitary grandeur on Salisbury Plain, and 

 able to learn nothing of its origin, should call it simply the 

 place of stones ? What more unnatural than that they should 

 do so, if they knew the name of him in whose honour it was 



* Giraldus. Topogr. of Ireland. 



t Wright's Wanderings of an Antiquary,, ]>. 301. 



