The Baths, Ancient and Modern. 153 



On the rebuilding of the city in the eighth 



Saxon Baths. . n i l 



century under its new name Bathancastra, the 

 Baths must have been standing, although in so great ruin 

 that the Saxon street over the Avon, by the bridge, (the 

 Roman piers of which the writer has seen,) instead of 

 running directly north on the line of the Roman street, was 

 diverted eastward and across their ruins, skirting in doing so 

 the spring of the King's Bath. Beneath this Saxon street 

 the Baths and corridors still exist, and, as far as the plan 

 and arrangements are concerned, the fragments are much 

 more complete than where buildings have been erected and 

 -re-erected during the last eleven hundred years. 



The only description extant of the condition of the Baths 

 <iuring this period is contained in the Saxon poem of The 

 Ruin in the " Exeter Book," to which attention was first 

 -called by the Rev. Professor Earle in 187 1,* and more 

 recently by Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., M.P., in his " Origins 

 -of English History." " There stood arcades of stone ; the 

 stream hotly issued, with eddies widening up to the wall 

 encircling all the bright bosomed pool; there the baths 

 Tvere * * * hot with inward heat; so they caused to 

 flow (into a sea of) stone the hot stream. High was the 

 roof of gold * * * And the court is dreary. And the 

 ■crowned roof lies low in the shadow of the purple arch."t 

 This, though possibly written in the seventh century, may, 

 allowing for their then more ruinous condition, be taken to 

 •describe the state of the Baths as late as the tenth century. 

 " The eddies widening up to the encircling wall " doubtless 

 refer to the springs themselves forming a sheet of water. 

 'The ruins, standing more or less in fragments, fell in, and in 



* See p. 29. 

 + This poem is assigned to Cynwulf by some writers. 



