By N. Story Maskelyne, Esq., M.P. 187 
entirely fashioned by Anglo-Saxon hands, for such fortresses exist 
where Saxon feet never trod: indeed the Saxon Burh was in general 
characterised by a mound raised within a previously-extant en- 
trenchment, and sometimes on it, while the very names these hill- 
forts still bear are often undisguisedly Celtic and prove they were 
in existence before the advent of the Saxons. Where a primeval 
or very early defensive work has been modified or strengthened in 
later times, a ditch once internal, as at Ringsbury, may have been 
deepened to form a bank internal to it, and a double cireumvallation 
then constructed ; and on further investigation it may turn out, as 
I have hinted, that the oldest work, that of the early neolithic men, 
took the former shape, that of the later men the latter and more 
defensive form. 
In order to realise the situation of our West Saxon ancestors after 
the taking of Old Sarum, we must go back in time a little, and 
picture to ourselves their bands under Cynric who, in 552, was an 
aged man. He had landed a youth with the first of the West Saxon 
marauders, from five ships in 495, at the head of Southampton 
Water. New swarms had subsequently joined the first adventurers 
from their distant hive, and they had grown into an invading host, 
and from invaders into settlers. Now, fifty-seven years after their 
first landing, they are masters of a rich and important part of England. 
Checked on the west by forest country teeming with their Bryt foes, 
they push northward and the commanding position of Sarum has 
become theirs. Before them, as they look still to the north, lies 
the plain of Salisbury, and, beyond, the rich vale of Pewsey, flanked 
and fronted by the forest barrier (then much more extensive than 
to-day) of Savernake—a name for which Dr. Guest thought he 
had found a derivation, in common with that of the river Severn, 
from an Erse word Sabhran—a boundary. It took Ceawlin four 
years to conquer and to consolidate the tenure of that intervening 
country and to pass the belt of forest (continuous then with Saver- 
nake) that divided, as its residue of wood still divides, the north of 
Pewsey Vale from the Marlborough Downs. The “ Chronicle” 
maintains its grim silence over the horrors that those four years no 
doubt added to the accumulated cruelties of the invaders. Evidently 
