128 The Early History of the Upper Wylye Valley. 
never be cultivated, originally with the idea of giving something to 
the evil spirits. And the name “Gun’s-church” is a puzzle. It is 
a round barrow standing on the southern extremity of Hill, away 
on the down, and the Teutonic “ spectral hunt” has become localised 
round it.? 
Two surnames which occur in the Brixton registers, Dredge and 
Maslin, give a glimpse into medieval farming. “Dredge” is mixed 
corn, sown together, such as oats, wheat, and barley; the word is 
used in the margin of Job, xxiv., 6, “ Maslin,” is “ miscellin,” Latin 
mixtilio, and is bread made of a mixture of rye and wheat-flour. 
At the dissolution of the Monasteries, the Glastonbury estates in 
Monkton and Longbridge were bought by Sir John Thynne, as the 
rhyme has it :— 
** Horner and Thynne 
When the monks went out, they came in”; 
but probably the change of owners affected the inhabitants but 
little. Nor is it likely that this district had felt the great change 
which began in 1460, when wool competed with corn-growing in some 
parts so severely, that, in the words of an unnamed petitioner to 
the Crown in 1536 :— 
‘‘The ploughs be decayed, and the farm-houses and other dwelling-houses ; 
so that, where they were twenty or thirty dwelling-houses, they be now 
decayed, ploughs and all the people clean gone . . . and no more 
parishioners in many parishes, but a neat-herd and a shepherd, instead of 
three-score or fourscore persons,” 
for on these upland farms there was room for both plough and sheep- 
fold. In the curious oral tradition about the deep-cut thicket-clad 
road by Longbridge Church, where ghostly “woolpacks” might 
tumble out upon the head of the nightly traveller or the straying 
child, we may have a recollection of this staple trade, which began 
no doubt in the earliest times. 
There are no more oral traditions till the Civil Wars begin. Of 
them we still hear an echo in Hill, where traces of the 
British village are popularly said to be the remains of houses 
which were battered by the cannon. The times were lively in the 

'Gun Hill, near Leek, in Staffordshire, is said to mean Battle Hill (A.S. 
gud). Does it? (Staffordshire Knots, p. 196. Vyse, Stoke-on-Trent, 1895). 

