276 Selwood Forest. 
against all round, and so smothered by dirty cottages, that there 
was nothing whatever of it to be seen from the outside but a bit of 
the end of a wall on which were two or three arches. I had certainly 
often noticed these, but never took them to be anything but a fancy 
ornament of some Bradford amateur. It was only by accident, 
by Canon Jones going to visit a sick person in an upper room, that 
he first spied undoubted marks which led to the discovery. This, 
by the way. Iam speaking of Aldhelm, and I must just ask for a 
very few words of Church history, to explain how he came to be 
connected with Selwood. We all know that in the old British 
times there was Christianity, and there were bishops in this country. 
But that Christianity had relapsed, through contact with the heathen 
Saxon, into a sort of semi-Paganism. Augustine, the monk, was 
sent from Rome to revive religion. His labours were confined to 
Kent: he had nothing to do with usin Wessex. Thirty years after 
him came another Roman missionary, whose name was Birinus. 
He it was who restored us, and he is called the Apostle of Wessex. 
The whole of Wessex—including Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, 
Somerset, and Devonshire—then formed one single diocese. It 
was, of course, soon found too large, so it was divided into two, and 
a curious point is tbat the boundary between the two is distinctly 
mentioned as Selwood Forest. Aldhelm was made Bishop of all to 
the west of Selwood, called the diocese of Sherborne; another had 
all to the east of Selwood, called the diocese of Winchester. Now, 
Aldhelm is mentioned in different chronicles by different titles, and 
in one of them he is called the Bishop of Selwoodshire. It is 
not quite easy to understand what was meant by Selwoodshire. 
The division into shires, as they are now, is supposed to have been 
finally arranged by King Alfred, one hundred years after Bishop 
Aldhelm, and as there is no mention of Selwoodshire, except in this 
solitary instance, it seems likely that the old chronicler who uses it 
meant only the country about Selwood, speaking in a vague, and 
not in any definite legal way, as we now speak of a shire. The word 
shire only meant a district severed off. We have in the county 
of York a certain portion about Sheffield still called Hallamshire ; in 
the same county are Richmondshire and Hullshire. Aldhelm being 
