512 Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, Articles, &c. 



fortress which held the Saxon advance at bay for the period from 520 

 to 552, when the line of the Avon was the Saxon boundary. 



Of the larger camps on the Wiltshire side of the border, Castle 

 Ditches, Winklebury, Castle Rings, Chiselbury, and Clearbury are 

 planned and described. 



Of the smaller, probably pastoral enclosures, there are plans and 

 descriptions of those on Marleycombe Hill in Bower Chalke, Chicken- 

 grove Bottom, Straight Knap on Berwick St. John Down, and three 

 near Knighton Hill in Broad Chalke. 



He believes that Bokerly Dyke was a defensive entrenchment thrown 

 up by the Romano-British to resist the Saxon invasion from the 

 Downton neighbourhood. Grim's Ditch, on the other hand, with its 

 ditch between two banks and its curiously winding course for four- 

 teen miles cannot, he thinks, be either a defensive work or a trackway. 

 " Its construction does not suggest purposes of defence, of connection 

 between British settlements, or of desire for concealment." It is, he 

 believes, a British tribal boundary. Two sections which he cut at 

 Gallows Hill on Breamore Down and Damerham Knoll in 1911 proved 

 that the bottom of the ditch was 1ft. 6in. wide, and showed no marks 

 of traffic. A few sherds of apparently pre-Roman pottery in one of 

 these sections in the filling of the ditch appeared to point to pre-Roman 

 origin. 



Altogether the book— a beautiful book in itself — gives a considerable 

 amount of information as to earthworks in South Wilts, which is not 

 to be gathered from other sources. 



Early Wars of Wessex ; being Studies from 

 England's School of Arms in the West. By 

 Albany F. Major, Author of Sagas and Songs 

 of the Norsemen, etc. Edited by the late 

 Chas. W. Whistler, M R C S ., author of A Thane 

 of Wessex ; King Alfred's Viking ; etc. Cam- 

 bridge, at the University Press. 1913. 



Linen, 8vo, pp. xvi. + 238. 10s. 6d. net. With plans and two 

 folding maps. 



The foundations on which the author builds up his theory of the 

 successive steps of the Saxon Conquest of Wessex are the existing 

 earthworks, the camps and ditches so numerous in Hampshire, Wilts, 

 and Dorset. He allows, indeed, that most of these in all probability 

 had their origin in prehistoric times, but he insists that they were 

 available for use by the Romano Britons against the advancing Saxons, 

 as they had been by their forefathers against the Romans four hundred 

 years before, and that they actually did form the bases of the British 

 resistance. Accordingly, speaking generally, he reads his history by 

 their light. He believes that Hampshire was really conquered by the 

 West Saxons, and he goes so far as to say that the boundaries of Hamp- 

 shire (until their alteration within the last few years) were settled at this 





