4 SKELETONS OF MEN AND HORSES. 



of warlike edifices, or religious endowments. Our 

 labourers have at various times dug up by the road 

 sides several skeletons of human beings, and of 

 horses ; they were in general but slightly covered 

 with earth ; and though the bones were much 

 decayed, yet the teeth were sound, and appeared 

 most commonly to have belonged to young persons, 

 and probably had been deposited in their present 

 situations at no very distant period of time. With 

 the bones of a horse so found there remained the 

 iron head of a lance, about a foot long, corroded, 

 but not greatly decayed. Unable better to account 

 for these skeletons, we suppose that they constituted, 

 when alive, part of the forces of General Fair- 

 fax, and that they fell in some partial encounters 

 with the peasantry when defending their property 

 about to be plundered by the foragers of his army 

 in 1645, at the time he was besieging the castle of 

 Bristol. The siege lasted sixteen or seventeen 

 days ; many parties during that time must have 

 been sent out by him to plunder us cavaliers, and 

 contention would take place. 



It is foreign to my plan to enumerate, and it 

 might be difficult to discover, all the changes and 

 revolutions which have taken place here ; and I shall 

 merely mention, that this district formerly consti- 

 tuted a regal forest, and we find Robert Fitzhard- 

 ing holding it by grant in the time of King John. 

 We have a tc lodge farm," it is true, and the 



