Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 329 



of late, that the stone is in the parish of Westbury, near Fairwood 

 House, by the side of the railway ; and on this point he shows how 

 untrustworthy are the modern Ordnance maps, with " Erbright's-stone " 

 in the six-inch, and " Cebright's Stone " in the one-inch. Anyone who 

 uses the Ordnance maps knows how carelessly the place-names have 

 been dealt with. He decides that the place was near Penselwood, and 

 mentions a " Bound stone" marked in Smith's County Atlas of 1804, in 

 the maps of Somerset and Dorset, at a point where the boundaries of 

 these counties meet those of Wilts. Bishop Clifford's identification of 

 the place with " White Sheet Castle," between Mere and Stourton he 

 regards as fantastic ; still, Bishop Clifford is nearer to the truth in this 

 localising of the spot than others who find a place further east, and he 

 has not fallen into the Brixton Deverill error, as Mr. Plummer has done 

 in his recent life of Alfred, following that most unfortunate piece of 

 carelessness on the part of Hoare. Aecglea, or Iglea, he finds in Hey 

 Wood, a portion of Southleigh Wood, in Warminster parish ; and sup- 

 ports it by etymological and historical arguments ; Cley Hill, near 

 Warminster, is declared to be impossible phonetically, and Higbleigh 

 Common, near Melksham, which was suggested by Whitaker in 1809, 

 he rejects. Ethandun he identifies with Edington, as Camden did. As 

 to the attempts of Bishop Clifford to prove that Edington in Somerset 

 is the site {Somerset Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 1877, p. 20, 

 part ii., pp. 1 — 27), he says " The whole article is of a very imaginative 

 and unsatisfactory nature, built upon improbable assumptions, baseless 

 identification of sites, impossible etymologies, and shows a general lack 

 of critical restraint." Nor is Eddington, in the parish of Hungerford, 

 Berks, possible, for that can be shown to be Eadgife-tun, " Eadgifu's- 

 town." The Berkshire archaeologists come off as badly as the Somerset. 

 The great argument in favour of Edington, Wilts, is, that none of the 

 other places now called Edington or Eddinton ever bore the name of 

 Ethandun, while this Edington almost certainly did. 



Lastly, he discusses the claims of Slaughterford. Whitaker, in his 

 edition of the Life of St. Neot, in 1809, stated Slaughterford to be the 

 site of the battle of Ethandun. Gough, in his edition of Camden's 

 Britannia, had mentioned the Slaughterford tradition that the village 

 was the site of a great slaughter of the Danes. This remark came from 

 the MSS. of John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary. Mr. Stevenson 

 replies "Before the Civil Wars most reputed battlefields were assigned 

 by the rustic traditions to the Danes, and in this case the tradition was 

 strengthened by the growth about Slaughterford of the plant known as 

 Danes' Blood (the dwarf Elder, Sambucus ebulus) , which is still popularly 

 supposed to grow only on spots that have been the scene of fights with 

 the Danes. In the present case there can be no doubt that the tradition 

 is aetiological. Illustrations of this belief will be found in the Dialect 

 Dictionary under the article " Danes'-blood " ; and the story is meant to 

 account for the colour of the juice, and is just a heightened way of ex- 

 pressing Virgil's 



4 Sanguineis ebuli baccis' (Eclog. x. 27) we think. 



