
“Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 329 
of late, that the stone is in the parish of Westbury, near Fairwood 
House, by the side of the railway; and on this point he shows how 
untrustworthy are the modern Ordnance maps, with ‘‘ Erbright’s-stone ”’ 
in the six-inch, and ‘ Cebright’s Stone” in the one-inch. Anyone who 
uses the Ordnance maps knows how carelessly the place-names have 
been dealt with. He decides that the place was near Penselwood, and 
mentions a ‘‘ Bound stone’’ marked in Smith’s County Atlas of 1804, in 
the maps of Somerset and Dorset, at a point where the boundaries of 
these counties meet those of Wilts. Bishop Clifford’s identification of 
the place with ‘‘ White Sheet Castle,’ between Mere and Stourton he 
regards as fantastic; still, Bishop Clifford is nearer to the truth in this 
localising of the spot than others who find a place further east, and he 
has not fallen into the Brixton Deverill error, as Mr. Plummer has done 
in his recent life of Alfred, following that most unfortunate piece of 
carelessness on the part of Hoare. Aecglea, or Iglea, he finds in ley 
Wood, a portion of Southleigh Wood, in Warminster parish; and sup- 
ports it by etymological and historical arguments; Cley Hill, near 
Warminster, is declared to be impossible phonetically, and Highleigh 
Common, near Melksham, which was suggested by Whitaker in 1809, 
he rejects. Ethandun he identifies with Edington, as Camden did. As 
to the attempts of Bishop Clifford to prove that Edington in Somerset 
is the site (Somerset Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 1877, p. 20, 
part ii., pp. 1—27), he says ‘‘ The whole article is of a very imaginative 
and unsatisfactory nature, built upon improbable assumptions, baseless 
identification of sites, impossible etymologies, and shows a general lack 
of critical restraint.” Nor is Eddington, in the parish of Hungerford, 
Berks, possible, for that can be shown to be Eadgife-tun, ‘“* Hadgifu’s- 
town.’ The Berkshire archeologists come off as badly as the Somerset. 
The great argument in favour of Edington, Wilts, is, that none of the 
other places now called Edington or Eddinton ever bore the name of 
Ethandun, while this Edington almost certainly did. 
Lastly, he discusses the claims of Slaughterford. Whitaker, in his 
edition of the Life of St. Neot, in 1809, stated Slaughterford to be the 
site of the battle of Ethandun. Gough, in his edition of Camden's 
Britannia, had mentioned the Slaughterford tradition that the village 
was the site of a great slaughter of the Danes. This remark came from 
the MSS. of John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary. Mr. Stevenson 
replies ‘‘ Before the Civil Wars most reputed battlefields were assigned 
by the rustic traditions to the Danes, and in this case the tradition was 
strengthened by the growth about Slaughterford of the plant known as 
Danes’ Blood (the dwarf Elder, Sambucus ebulus), which is still popularly 
supposed to grow only on spots that have been the scene of fights with 
the Danes. In the present case there can be no doubt that the tradition 
is aetiological. Illustrations of this belief will be found in the Dialect 
Dictionary under the article ‘‘ Danes’-blood”; and the story is meant to 
account for the colour of the juice, and is just a heightened way of ex- 
pressing Virgil’s 
*‘ Sanguineis ebuli baccis’ (Eclog. x. 27) we think. 
