THE WOLD ENTRENCHMENTS. 125 



shed, a little to the south of the Dannewerk, and the Oster 

 Wall, between the Sclilei and the Eckerfordern Harbour. There 

 are also other old boundary walls and earth-works in different 

 parts of the same country. These facts may seem to militate 

 ag-ainst what has been stated above, nor do I deny that they 

 possess some weight ; but at the same time, they may, as 

 I have remarked of the Dannewerk, be defensive works of an 

 earlier time than the Teutonic settlement of those parts. Having 

 then due regard to this supposition and to the fact that, on 

 the whole, fortified places are uncommon within the country 

 occupied by our ancestors in tlieir older seats, I cannot assent to 

 the view which would attribute the wold entrenchments to the 

 Anglian invaders. It does not appear that it was ever the 

 habit of that branch of the human family, to which the 

 designation of Teutonic has been commonly applied, and to 

 which the Angles belonged, to depend upon an elaborate system 

 of fortification for their defence, nor do we find that they adopted 

 it even when they came into possession of countries where 

 such arrangements w^ere abundant, and which they must have 

 found to be no trifling hinderances to their progress of conquest. 

 We ourselves, mainly a Teutonic people, and showing our origin 

 in all the spirit of our institutions and mode of government, 

 good and bad, have never heartily entered upon any system of 

 defending the country by fortified places, and have always placed 

 more reliance upon the arm of flesh and our wooden walls than 

 upon those elaborate stone and earth-works which other nations 

 have carried to such pei'fection. To speak roundly, there were no 

 castles in England before the Conquest by William and his 

 Normans, who originally of kindred stock with the Saxon, 

 Angle, and Jute, had nevertheless lost most of their Norse 

 blood by intermarriage, and who had become as Gallic in their 

 habits and speech as in their blood. 



There is nothing which has ever been found, so far as I 

 know, in connection with the entrenchments of the wolds, 

 enabling us to attribute them with certainty to any time or 

 people. The remains of the implements which were used in 

 their construction, and some of which must probably have been met 

 with within the mounds when they were levelled in the course of 

 cultivation, have never been observed, so that any information 

 which the occurrence of such things as broken picks of deer's-horn 

 or stone axes, if they belong to the time when such were in u-^e, 



