174 Congress of British Archaeological Association at Devizes. 



anyone who went to Bratton Castle and then again to Vespasian's 

 Camp, and compared the two together, would at once acknowledge 

 they had been the work of one people, and that from their size they 

 were much more likely to have been the fortifications around some 

 town than bare camps. There was another point that was ventilated 

 at the time, which he ventured to think fell to the ground. He 

 thought that though the British could claim the camps, it was not 

 proved that they could claim the straight Roman roads, but they 

 had gone a step further, because he believed that at that meeting 

 they had applied the same principle that gave the earthworks to the 

 old inhabitants, to the Churches. And this showed how one 

 discovery in archseology elucidated some other. If it had not 

 been for Canon Jones and the Saxon Church at Bradford, they 

 would not have thought much about Saxon Churches, and now, just 

 as they used to call everything that is old amongst earthworks, 

 Roman, and now called them British, so the Churches that they had 

 been in the habit of calling Norman, such as that at Avebury and 

 another at Netheravon, certainly might have been Saxon in their 

 original design, and he ventured to say that that accorded with our 

 history. It was what we ought to expect. Edward the Confessor, 

 during his reign, brought in many Norman customs, and the two 

 styles would have been blended together even in Saxon times ; and 

 when the Conqueror came, he did not seek to act as a conqueror, 

 but to take legal possession of the throne as the successor of Edward, 

 and therefore it would have been perfectly absurd for him to have 

 had the Saxon Churches pulled down. Neither could they have 

 become decayed all at the same time : and therefore it was reasonable 

 to suppose that though they might have been added to by the 

 Normans, yet that many Saxon remains must exist in many of those 

 churches which had been attributed entirely to the Normans. He 

 '* thought this was one of the things they had got out of the work 

 of the week. And there was another thing they had done. He 

 thought that anyone who had seen Avebury one day and Stonehenge 

 two days after, would not for a moment suppose that the same 

 people could have had anything to do with the two places. The 

 peculiarity of the greater one at Avebury was that as the stones 



