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the Weald of Kent. Henry of Huntingdon gave an account of 

 the siege, which did not look like rhetorical flourish, and which 

 Mr. Freeman thought must have been drawn from ballads. After 

 quoting the chronicler, Mr. Earle said that the spot was identified 

 by Mr. Freeman vidth the remains of a desolate city near Pevensey. 

 The Saxons appeared when they had taken a Roman-British city 

 not to have lived in it but to have avoided it. In this instance 

 there were very old Saxon settlements on either side, at Pevensey 

 and at Westham. In their own day at Silchester, the wall of 

 which had long stood above ground, streets had been laid open 

 and a large city shown. At Wroxeter he understood that the 

 whole city had been laid out like Pompeii, though when he saw 

 it years ago it was a turnip field. That was the general course, 

 when the Saxons took a city they destroyed it and left it desolate. 

 With regard to Chester they had a remarkable historical state- 

 ment in the chronicles of the Danish wars of Alfred. In a passage 

 which was remarkably contemporary, it was stated that the course 

 of the war went in that direction, and that a party of the Danes 

 went into a waste Chester (or castra) and held it. This was the 

 modern Chester, and hence the old name of Westchester, mean- 

 ing Waste-chester, though Gibson and other antiquaries of the 

 18th century had erroneously interpreted Westchester as the 

 Chester in the West. Layamon's "Brut," whose date was 1205, 

 and which was well known to be drawn from much older sources, 

 said that Leicester was founded by Lear (the Lear of Shakes- 

 peare), and was a very rich city, and then described how it was 

 destroyed and the people put to the sword. They thus had 

 instances of cities at that moment lying waste as Anderida and 

 Silchester ; and of cities now inhabited respecting which they had 

 evidence of their having once been waste, as Chester, respecting 

 which they had historical evidence of the first order; and 

 Leicester, respecting which they had evidence of the poetical order. 

 He had no doubt that Bath also lay waste, as he said in a paper 

 read to the Club some years ago upon a poem from the Codex 

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