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By N. Story Maskelyne, Esq., M.P. 189 
between Barbury and Hakpen. Thus, then, Barbury Castle stands 
out as one of the great bastions in a line of hill-forts, guarding the 
meeting-points of important roads. But of the part that Barbury has 
played in history we know no more than that it gave its name to a 
great battle which opened to the Saxon hero, Ceawlin, a large part of 
the wide plain that the eye ranges over from Hakpen hill, and brought 
him in contact with, and far across, the boundaries of what was 
subsequently Mercia on the north-east; while, to north-west and west, 
the British line of possession and defence was driven back till it rested 
on Cirencester and the line of the Cotswolds in the direction of Bath. 
It may be relevant to ask of what material, and in what numbers, 
the Saxon army would have been composed? We know little 
of the size of these armies. Henry of Huntingdon states that 
for the attack on Searo-byrig Cynric collected forces from his allies. 
Ceawlin, who at this battle comes to the front as heir to his old 
father Cynric’s leadership, and was soon afterwards recognised as 
Bretwalda of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, would certainly have mustered 
some of them as allies in addition to his West Saxon soldiers. The 
armies must have been large enough for the defeat of one of them 
to be a crushing conquest of a people. It was so with both parties 
after Badon Hill,} where the Britons appear, from lamentations of 
Gildas, to have been only less crushed than the foe they overcame. 
It was so after the battle of Barbury, and a few years later Deorham 
was in every sense decisive of the fate of the people whose army was 
beaten. The Briton host before Barbury must therefore have heen 
drawn from every quarter of that great expanse of field and forest 
that the eye looked over then, as we look over it now, from the 
erest of Hakpen. Immediately to the north of the escarpment of 
the Marlborough Downs stretches the fertile chalk marl region, of 
which the edge is seen from the vale of the Thames as one looks 
south. It is conspicuous with its picturesque hangers of wood and 
1T do not venture to connect this decisive battle with the West Saxon conquests 
and decide either for the Dorset Badbury Rings as the Mons Badonicus, as 
propounded by Dr. Guest and accepted by Green, or for the view of Mr. Skene 
which Mr. C. Elton accepted, that it was the Bouden Hill near Linlithgow, 
though on the whole I consider the preponderanee of the evidence to be in favour 
of the northern site. 
