Ilecent Wiltshire Books, Farn/pldets, Articles, &c. 183 



This is an enlargement of a paper read by the author at the Meeting 

 of the Society at Salisbury in 1908, and in it he undertakes to combat 

 the view of Green, Freeman, and others, that Cerdic landed somewhere 

 in Southampton Water, and to establish his contention that " Cerdice's 

 Ora," the place of the landing, was really near Christchurch, twenty or 

 thirty miles to the M'-estwards. His argument runs thus. The Saxons, 

 like the Danes, aliuays moved up a river as tar as they could take their 

 boats, and never landed till they were obliged to do so. The Battle of 

 " Cerdicesford," in which Cerdic crushed the Britons in 519, was ad- 

 mittedly fought at Oharford, on the Christchurch Avon, twenty miles 

 from the sea. Therefore, argues Mr. Hill, Cerdic must have come up 

 the Avon river or the Avon valley, instead of following the Itchin to 

 Winchester first and then marching across the New Forest to Charford, 

 as the historians assume that he did. It was thirty- three years later 

 when Old Sarum was taken ; and Mr. Hill supposes either that the 

 victory of Charford was really no victory at all, or that the Saxons 

 spent those years in slowly fighting their way up the valley of the Avon 

 (the distance from Charford to Old Sarum is only twelve miles), and in 

 that case he accounts for their slow progress by the fact that " the low 

 lying valley of the Avon, about two miles in width, and in the sixth 

 century an almost impenetrable morass, must have caused any hostile 

 advance to be slow and laborious." But does not this sentence give 

 his whole case away? Why it should be assumed that the Saxons 

 spent years in laboriously forcing their boats up unnavigable streams 

 such as in all probability the Itchin, the Test, and the Avon w^ere in 

 the sixth century, or in making their way through the morasses and 

 swamps of a valley, when they could reach high and dry land on either 

 side of the valley in half-an-hour's march, is hard to understand. The 

 Roman roads existed, the Romano-British villages and cultivated lands 

 were, as we know, not in the valleys at all, but on the high lands ; and 

 surely when the distances to be covered were not more than two days' 

 march at the most, it is hardly worth Avhile supposing that the invaders 

 spent their energies in struggling up impossible trout streams, when 

 chalk downs, good roads, or sandy heaths, were always within a mile 

 or two of them. We should not think of doing so ourselves, why should 

 we refuse to credit our ancestors with less of the most elementary 

 commonsense than any savage tribe possesses at the present day ? The 

 whole of the elaborate argument of this treatise takes it for granted 

 that the Saxon advance imist have been by the river valleys, at all 

 events until after the fall of Old Sarum in r)r)2, when apparently he 

 allows that they kei)t to the ui)land and 0])en country. Surely it is far 

 more reasonable to sup])Ose that they did so from the first. Mr. Hill's 

 main object is to prove that Wilton and not Winchester was for many 

 years, ])erhaps for a hundred years, the West Saxon cajntal, as Henry 

 of Huntingdon asserts, and that Winchester was held at first, not by 

 the West Saxons, but by tho Jutish Meanwara. Wilton " was the town 

 ■of the settlers on tlif \\'\l\('. and the WnInt valley was the spot troni 

 which issued the arni\' that sulxhied what we now eall W'e^sex."' 



