-Ethnological History. 



in a stone sarcophagus at North Stoke exhibits indications; 

 which may be so construed. Of earher skulls there are in 

 the Museum of the Philosophical Institution one or two of 

 small size and inferior development, which Dr. Henry Bird 

 describes as " tump skulls," and refers to the earliest race j 

 but the attribution is uncertain. 



Saxon Bath was taken, according to the Chronicle, 



Conquests. (jy CeawHn of Wessex, after his great victory 

 at Deorham, in a.d. 577, when he slew three kings and took 

 three ckesters, of which Bathanceaster was one (see Hallett, 

 '^Bristol and Gloucestershire Archceological Transactions" 

 viii., 62). It is believed that Bath lay waste for some time 

 after its capture, and its inhabitants were probably dis- 

 persed or amalgamated with the Britons who formed the 

 lower strata of the neighbouring population. It is doubtful 

 whether the West Saxons crossed the Avon southwards 

 after the battle of Deorham. Englishcombe, a village to 

 the south-west of Bath, already mentioned as close to the 

 Wansdyke, must at some time have been again a boundary, 

 this time between the Welsh and the invading Saxons, but 

 whether this was immediately after Deorham fight, or some- 

 what later, is not quite clear. Dr. Guest ingeniously shewed 

 the probability that the Damnonian kingdom, for some time 

 after that event, still included the valley of the Upper Avon,, 

 and the western borders of Wiltshire ; though no one doubts 

 that the valleys which radiate northwards and westwards 

 from Salisbury, including Wilton, the mother settlement of 

 Wiltshire, had been occupied by the West Saxons at a very 

 early date. Certainly the race frontier hereabout, though 

 often strongly marked, is very winding and irregular. 



Malmesbury (Maildulfs-bury ? Moelmydsbury ?)* was an 



* Founded by Maildulf, Meildulf, or Meldun, an Irish Monk. 



