By the Rev. W. ©. Plenderleath. 59 
and, as his faithful chronicler informs us, “rode to the stone 
Aebryhta, which is the eastern part of the forest that is called 
Selwood, but in Latin Petra Magna, in British Coit-maur.” 
And now comes the difficulty. We have accepted the cakes, but 
some of our greatest authorities find it difficult to digest the stone, 
or at any rate to convert it into such good honest historical pabulum 
as to be able to say exactly where it stood, or perhaps still stands. 
For a long time it was largely believed that the name of Brixton 
Deverell indicated its position, Brixton seeming a very probable 
corruption of Ecbyrt’s stone. But, as all philologers know, there 
is no such conclusive argument against a derivation as its primd facie 
probability, even as you know that the one thimble upon the race- 
course table under which the pea is not, is the one under which you 
thought that with your own eyes you saw it placed! And a learned 
member of this Society, in an article published in the Wiltshire 
Archaological Magazine some fifteen years ago, suggested as a more 
probable site for this Petra Echryghti that whereupon stands an 
ancient stone called in Andrews and Dury’s Map of Wilts “ Redbridge 
Stone,” on the Fairford estate. This stone may be seen in a small 
plantation on the left hand of the railway cutting, about a mile 
from the Westbury Station, on the way towards Frome, and projecting 
somewhere about two or three feet from the ground. 
After describing the enthusiasm with which King Alfred was 
received at this trysting-place, the Chronicle proceeds to tell us that 
he there encamped for one night: then went on at dawn of the 
next day to a place called Ficglea, where he spent another night. 
Now where was Aicglea? It has been variously conjectured to 
have been either Cley Hill, or else Buckley (now generally spelled 
Bugley), which are respectively a mile and a half and one mile to 
the west of Warminster; or, on the other hand, to have been 
somewhere on the borders of Berkshire, in a place subsequently 
known as the Hundred of Aieglei, some thirty miles from Westbury. 
And it has been suggested as against the claims of the two former 
sites that they are too near to the place of encampment of the pre- 
1Vol. xiii., pp. 108, 9. 
