272 Inaugural Address of the 
In the selection of problems for discussion, a President of a 
County Society must be guided by the locality in which he finds 
himself. You are a Wiltshire Society; and as in private duty 
bound, you think there is no part of the kingdom so interesting 
from an archeological point of view as your own county. The 
county which holds Stonehenge and Avebury has some claim to 
that opinion. 
This year you specially visit the north part of the county, and 
I think we can show you that few, if any, archeological interests 
are greater than those which gather in the earliest times around 
Malmesbury. The consideration of my first problem will take us 
into that dim period of the past when the Briton was still holding 
out in some of the old fastnesses against the Saxon and the Angle ; 
when the foreign and the native Church were agreeing to differ, 
while the pagan Saxons remained rooted in their idolatry. 
We find ourselves to-day on a site remarkable by its position 
and by its history. You very seldom see in any non-mountainous 
part a place so well marked out by nature as Malmesbury is for a 
place of strength. The streets and houses to a considerable extent 
obscure the fact; but if, as you walked about this afternoon, you 
had this in your mind, you would perpetually see what Malmesbury 
must have been in the time of bows and arrows and javelins. And 
if this is so now that the encircling streams have dwindled down 
to modest proportions, and are fairly confined within their rich 
grassy banks, it must have been much more markedly true when 
those two rivers were great spreading swamps and morasses, choked 
with the débris of impenetrable forests, leaving the promontory of 
Malmesbury to stand out with its own natural abruptness from an 
impassable marsh, with approach only at one narrow neck flanked 
by precipitous sides. The British fortress on the heights of 
Malmesbury was one of their strongest places of defence; and 
history seems to show that no other place held out in full force 
against the surrounding Saxons as this did. No other British 
place remained undisturbed, with its complete British life and 
work, right out among the Saxons geographically, right on into 
Saxon history, as Malmesbury did. The tradition is that this 
