56 Westbury under the Plain. 
that a commander-in-chief, anxious to pounce unexpectedly on an 
enemy, should occupy a whole day from dawn to get over five or six 
miles, and then go to sleep again within sight of his enemy at 
Bratton. Moreover, if the Danish general, being in Bratton Camp, 
saw that Alfred and his army had reached Cley Hill, and were close 
upon him, he would surely never have come out of his stronghold on 
the hill, but would have kept snug behind his rampart, and let Alfred 
turn him out if he could. And there is another circumstance which 
has always stood in the way of accepting your Edington as the place. 
Soon after the battle, Alfred prevailed upon the Danish leader to 
change his faith and be publicly baptized in a Church, which was 
done. Was it in Edington or Bratton Church? In neither ; but 
at Aller. Now Aller, in Somersetshire, is the nearest Church to 
that other Edington at which Bishop Clifford fixes the Battle of 
fEthandun. There is certainly no white horse there ; nor, according 
to another, and a rather increasing number of archzologists, was 
there any reason to expect one; because, according to their opinion, 
these ancient figures of horses in conspicuous places had nothing 
whatever to do with any battles in the time of King Alfred, but 
had been displayed on the hill side, weather-beaten, scoured or 
unscoured, as the case might be, for centuries before Alfred was born. 
These writers consider them to have been emblems connected with 
the superstitious religion of the old Britons. On the original 
rudely-cut horse at Bratton there was a crescent attached to the 
horse: and it is very remarkable that a crescent accompanies the 
figure of a rudely-cut horse upon ancient British coins. Dr. Phené, 
a learned foreigner, in writing upon these subjects tells us, in one 
of his papers, just issued, that he has made them almost the sole 
study of his life; for he has spent no less than thirty years in 
travelling all over the world to search for and examine these strange 
emblems of animals. They are most frequently found in earthworks, 
mounds, and banks, heaped up in the shape of an elephant, dragon, 
serpent, or the like. He assigns to them all a strange religious 
origin, and very great antiquity. I lately read in some magazine 
article (the reference to which I have unfortunately mislaid) that in 
a work on “Travels in Central America,” the author mentions his 
