STONEHENGE. 51 



It is wonderful how so many and such large stones could 

 have been collected in one place, and by what artifice they 

 could have been erected ; and other stones, not less in size, 

 placed upon such large and lofty stones, which appear, as it 

 were, to be so suspended in the air, as if by the design of the 

 workmen, rather than by the support of the upright stones. 

 These stones (according to the British history) Aurelius 

 Ambrosius, king of the Britons, procured Merlin, by super- 

 natural means, to bring from Ireland into Britain. And 

 that he might have some famous monument of so great a 

 treason to future ages, in the same order and art as they 

 stood formerly, set them up where the flower of the British 

 nation fell by the cut-throat practice of the Saxons, and 

 where, under the pretence of peace, the ill- secured youth of 

 the kingdom, by murderous designs, were slain."* 



This account is clearly mythical. Moreover, the very name 

 of Stonehenge, seems to me a very strong argument against 

 those who attribute to it so recent an origin. It is generally 

 considered to mean the Hanging-stones, as indeed was long 

 ago suggested by Wace, an Anglo-Norman poet, who says, 



Stanhengues ont nom en Englois 



Pieres pandues en Francois, f 



but it is surely more natural to derive the last syllable from 

 the Anglo-Saxon word "ing," a field; as we have Keston, 

 originally Kyst-staning, the field of stone coffins. What 

 more natural, than that a new race, finding this magnificent 

 ruin, standing in solitary grandeur on Salisbury Plain, and 

 able to learn nothing of its origin, should call it simply 

 the place of stones? what more unnatural, than that they 

 should do so, if they knew the name of him, in whose honor 

 it was erected ? The plan, also, of Stonehenge seems to be a 

 sufficient reason for not referring it to post-Roman times. It 



* Giraldus. Topogr. of Ireland. 

 f Wright's "Wanderings of an Antiquary, p. 301. 



