9) Oa eee 
By R. C. Alexander, Esq., M.D. 195 
persevering for a long time, by divine favour at last gained the 
victory, overthrew the pagans with very great slaughter, and put 
them to flight and pursued them with deadly blows up to their 
stronghold, and all that he found outside of it, men, horses, and 
sheep he seized, immediately killed the men, and boldly encamped 
before the entrance of the pagan stronghold with all his army.” 
These two accounts, the Saxon of the Chronicle, and the Latin 
of Asser, which Wright maintains is of a later period, are clearly 
copied from the same document, or one from the other. The Latin 
seems to be an expansion of the Saxon, except in what it says of 
the Hampshire men flying beyond sea. The Chronicle seems to 
mean the part of the county, on this, the west side of Southampton 
water. The account given by the other chroniclers, Ethelwerd , 
Florence of Worcester, Huntingdon, and Simeon of Durham, will 
be seen in Giles’s ‘Alfred the Great,’ Jubilee edition, i. p. 72. 
The reader will notice in Asser’s account of the victory the words 
‘ belligerans,’ warring, ‘diu persistens,’ persevering long, ‘tandem vic- 
toria potitus,’ at last got the victory, expressions which imply a 
campaign previous to the blockade of the stronghold, rather than a 
mere battle, and are important in reference to the camps above 
Heytesbury, which if Bratton castle was the Danish fortress, were 
probably Alfred’s entrenchments. 
In the discussion upon the site of this most important event, 
which secured the preponderance of Wessex and its language and 
civilization, and but for which we should probably never have had 
any Anglo-Saxon literature to tell the tale of those times, there has 
hitherto been no attempt made to derive information from an 
analysis of the names of places mentioned. People have listened 
only to some fancied resemblance of sound between them and the 
names of some existing villages, and neglected to ask the meaning 
of the ancient terms, and whether it tallied with the supposed site 
of those places. In the following remarks I attempt little more 
than to call attention to the use of examining these names by ana- 
lysis, and do not presume to suppose that I have settled anything. 
We learn then from the passages quoted, that Alfred came on 
horseback, yrad, equitavit, from A%peling-ey, the island of nobles, 
o 2 
