A HILL-TOP STRONGHOLD. 253 



above often bear witness to our own day to the original 

 Bite of the antique settlement upon the high places. 



One can mark, too, various stages in this gradual 

 process of secular descent from the wind-swept hills into 

 the valleys below, as freer communications and greater 

 security made access to water, roads, and rivers of greater 

 importance than mere defence or elevated position. At 

 Bath, for example, it was the Pax Eomana that brought 

 down the town from the stockaded height of Caer Badon, 

 and the Hill of Solisbury to the ford and the hot springs 

 in the valley of the Avon. At Old Sarum, on the other 

 hand, the hill-top town remained much longer : it lived 

 from the Celtic first into the Roman and then into the 

 "West Saxon world ; it had a cathedral of its own in 

 Norman times ; and even long after Bishop Roger Poore 

 founded the New Sarum, which we now call Salisbury, 

 ai the point where the great west road passed the river 

 below, the hill-top town continued to be inhabited, and, 

 as everybody knows, when all its population had finally 

 dwindled away, retained some vestige of its ancient 

 importance by returning a member of its own for a single 

 farmhouse to the unreformed Parliament till '32. As for 

 Fiesole, though Florence has long since superseded it as 

 the capital of the Arno Valley, the town itself still lives 

 on to our own time in a dead-alive way, and, like Norman 

 Old Sarum, retains even now its beautiful old cathedral, 

 its Palazzo Pretorio, and its acknowledged claims to 

 ancient boroughship. In England, I know by personal 

 experience only one such hill-top town of the antique 

 sort still surviving, and that is Shaftsbury ; but I am 

 told that Launceston, with its strong castle overlooking 



