By William Long, Esq. IS 



Around Amesbury the Briton was fighting for aU that was dearest 

 to him ; and thus may we account for the desperate resistance which 

 enabled him to maintain a weak frontier for nearly sixty years withm 

 little more than twenty miles of Winchester." 



If the massacre at Amesbury was a massacre of Christians, Stone- 

 henge was hardly the kind of monument which would have been 

 erected to commemorate their dead by Christian survivors and sue- 



cessors. 



Giraldus Cambrensis (born lU6_died 1223), in his « Topogaphia 

 Hiberniffi/' which was completed in 1187, speaking of some large 

 stones in the plain of Kildare of a similar character to those now to 

 be seen at Stonehenge, relates how the latter had been originally 

 brought by giants from the remotest parts of Africa, and set up in 

 Ireland, where they were called "Chorea Gigantura," but that 

 according to British history they had been at the instigation of 

 Ambrosius brought over by Merlin, to Britain, and set up where 

 the flower of Britain had been treacherously slain by the Saxons. 

 The writer thinks that we may fairly say, with Leland, " Fabulosa 

 fere omnia de lapidibus ex Hibernia adductis." 



Wace, who died after 1171, in his Anglo-Norman translation of 

 the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, under the title of Li Romans 

 de Brut, thus speaks of Merlin and Stonehenge (line 8381, Rouen 

 ed., 1836) :— 



«« Et Merlins les pieres dre9a 

 Encor ordre et les aloa. 

 Breton lea solent en Bretans 

 Cerole des geans Apeler Karole as gaians ; 



Stonehenge Senhange ont non en englois, 



Pieres pendules en fran9ois." 



In "Analyse du Roman de Brut'' by Le Roux de Liney, the 



> On the British Church during the Roman period (A.D. 200-450), and on 

 the British Church during the period of Saxon Conquest (A.D. 450-681), see 

 Haddan and Stubb's " Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great 

 Britain and Ireland, vol. i., 1869." The Appendix C. to the first portion, en- 

 titled " Monumental Remains of the British Church during the Roman Period, 

 and Appendix F. to the second, entitled " Sepulchral InscnpUons in (Celtic) 

 Britain, A.D, 460—700," are particularly interesting. 



