A HISTORY OF DORSET 



lacked intensity. No Dorset town received the higher municipal franchise ; 

 while the villa-remains end at Lyme Regis.^ 



The long prevailing view of the West Saxon conquest was that, after 

 their first settlement round the Solent, the Gewissas received a check at 

 Badbury,^ that the thick forests then covering the present Dorset caused a check 

 in their incursions, and led ultimately to the conquest of the Selwood by way 

 of Wiltshire and Somerset, and not by sea. This conquest is said to have 

 been very gradual, and to have taken place by distinct stages, between the 

 conquest of Old Sarum,^ and the beginning of the eighth century. The 

 victory of Deorham (577) threw open the Severn valley, and the invaders, 

 (forced back upon the territories in their rear, by the insurrection of the 

 Hwiccas, and loss of the Severn valley and the Cotswolds), poured thence 

 over Mendip.* Cenwalh's victory in 658 ' aet Peonnum ' is placed at 

 Poyntington, near Sherborne, and called an incident in the attempted pene- 

 tration of the forest barrier.' Under Ine and his saintly kinsman Aldhelm,' 

 Christianity and education went hand in hand with military conquest, the new 

 frontier-fortress of Taunton ^ precluding help for the Selwood Britons from 

 their hard-pressed kinsmen of Dyvnaint. At the same time the foundation 

 of the West Saxon monastery at Wareham * shows attempts at subjugation and 

 colonization by way of the north-east. 



Objections to this circumstantial reconstruction are fourfold. It is con- 

 tended that the use of documents is uncritical, that the arguments from 

 philology are faulty, and from archaeology untrustworthy.' Also it is said 

 that Dorset has been planted with ' great stretches of woodland ' on the basis 

 solely of twelfth-century forest perambulations, and to suit the necessities of 

 a preconceived theory. It is true that we have no good evidence of the extent 

 of land under trees in the sixth and seventh centuries. But the assumption, 

 though based on inadmissible evidence, would seem not unreasonable. 

 Physical conditions would render very probable the presence of trees in great 

 numbers. Even at the present day the area under trees is 37,600 acres, out 

 of a total acreage of only 625,578. The clay districts, amounting roughly to 

 nearly half the county, naturally favour the growth of trees, and the chalk 

 uplands ^° show a wide distribution of superficial gravels, particularly along 

 the borders of the vale of Blackmoor, on the chalk hills along the Piddle, at 

 Durweston (where the chalk abuts on the Stour valley), on the chalk between 

 Blandford and Dorchester, and at Dewlish.^' They also cover many even of 



' See Smart, InltoJ. to Primaeval Ethnology of Dorset ; Warne, Ancient Dorset ; Sussex Arch. Coll. xxxiv, 239, 

 sqq. ; F. J. Haverfield, ' Romanization of Roman Britain ' (Proc. Brit. Acad.), ii, 8. 



' Gildas, Hisi. Sec. ; Bede, Ecc/. Hist. (ed. Plummer) ; Notes and Queries for Som. and Dors, i, 43 ; Notes 

 and Queries (6th Ser.), xii, 461 ; (7th Sen), iv, 208, 372. 



'An. 552. Angl.-Sax. Ckron. (Rolls Ser.), ii, 17. 



*J. R. Green, Making of Engl. 129, 339 ; Guest, in Arch. foum. xvi, 109-17. 



' Angl.-Sax. Chron. (Rolls Ser.), ii, 24, 26 ; T. Kerslake, ' The Welsh in Dorset ' {^Proc. Dors. Field 

 Club), iii, 81. 



* Bede, op. cit. (ed. Plummer), ii, 308, note. 



^Angl.-Sax. Chron. (Rolls Ser.), ii, 39 ; Freeman, in Som. Arch. foum. xx, 31, xviii, 37. 



'Dugdale, Mon. Ar.gl. vi, pt. iii, 1617 ; see Freeman, Engl. Totvns and Dists. 151. 



'W. H. Stevenson in Engl. Hist. Rev. 1902, p. 625 sqq. 



'° Geol. Sirv. Maps, ii, plate ; and ibid. Memoirs, 'Cretaceous Rocks,' i, 144-91. 



"Analysis of Dorset soils, from Stevenson's Agricultural Report: Chalk, 160,759 acres ; sand, 8;, I 57 ; 

 loam, 37,746; gravel, 59,894; cornbrash, 29,700 ; clay, 117,331 ; miscellaneous, 13,427 acres. Damon, 

 Geology of Weymouth (ed. 1884), 137. 



