By William Long, Esq., M.A. 361 



of the ecclesiastical manor now exist, they should be carefully ex- 

 amined ; and I make no doubt that much interesting matter might 

 be collected from them. If they contained no notices of grants to 

 the tenants of portions of the stones, or of land within the area, 

 they would at least show the number of freeholders, and perhaps 

 of other tenants, and a guess might be made at the population 

 which had collected round the church in the middle ages of our 

 history. I suspect that it was very small, and that the extension 

 of the village within the bounds of the enclosure has been the work 

 of the three last centuries. It is manifest that many of the houses 

 are recent erections : some of them are certainly on new sites, and 

 even those which are supposed to be re-edifications, may be on sites 

 not more than two or three centuries old."^ 



very possibly have been Avebury circle itself." It may be questioned whether 

 Mr. J. M. Kemble was able to give the requisite attention for the identification 

 of the different localities specified in this charter ; and he ^rill not carry many 

 readers with him in his assertion that Hackpen means the cii-cle itself. With 

 perhaps somewhat unjust sarcasm, he concludes: 



"The avenue you see, which my friends the Ophites consider so mysterious, 

 was only a common stone row, and the 'temple' itself of the snake, the sun, 

 the Helio-Arkite cult, the mystic zodiac, and a number of other very tine things 

 — so fine that one cannot understand them — is very probably, in the eyes of this 

 dull dog of a surveyor, only a burial place. As for the stone ring, it was only 

 Haca's pen or enclosure, though I dare say Haca himself was some mythical 

 personage whom I have not been able to identify The Anglo- 

 Saxon did not know that Ilae in Hebrew meant a serpent, and Pen in Welsh a 

 head ; and would hardly have been ingenious enough to fancy that one word 

 could be made up of two parts derived from two different languages ! though he 

 raved about snakes, he does not seem to have raised his mind to the contempla- 

 tion of Dracontia. And he was quite right. Would that some of his successors 

 had been as little led away by their fancy !" 



' Unlike Stonehenge, which has been so often celebrated in song, Abury has 

 been, as far as the writer is aware, the subject of only two poetical efl'usions. 

 One entitled " The Old Serpentine Temple of the Druids at Avebury, in North 

 Wilts, a Poem," printed at Marlborough in 1795, was the composition of the 

 Rev. Charles Lucas, A.M., when he was curate of Avebury. Mr. Lucas was 

 for many years curate at Devizes, and died there in 1854, aged 85. He was 

 also the author of " Joseph," a poem, in two volumes Svo. He was a man of 

 fortune, and never held any church preferment. His poem on Abury extended 

 to 29 pages, and is a versification of Stukeley's description. Another is a MS. 

 poem by the Rev, John Skinner, the Somersetshire antiquary, and Rector of 

 Camerton, entitled " Beth Pennard, or the British Chieftain's Grave." It was 

 written " to commemorate the opening of an ancient British barrow near the 



