186 



Barhury Castle, 



Barbury has no such complete tradition as surrounds Old Sarum, 

 though the vicissitudes of its tenure and its first origin were probably 

 not dissimilar. The clump of beeches that stand, weird sentries, 

 just outside its trenches, bears witness to the presence of a thin 

 capping of tertiary sand and clay overlying the chalk of. the hill, 

 and suggests the probability that in ancient times a grove of trees 

 may have sheltered the bleak spit of down. Caasar tells of the 

 oppida of the Britons as he knew them. The oppidum of Cassivell- 

 aunus was protected by woods and marshes, and would on occasion 

 hold large numbers of people with their flocks and herds. Protected 

 by vallum ^ and foss, and strongly defended by nature as well as by 

 art, a British oppidum, hidden when possible in the depths of a 

 forest or crowning some commanding knoll, offered security from 

 the incursions of foemen, and the inhabitants gathered there from 

 their villages and huts, together with their moveable property at 

 the approach of danger. The Roman method of attack on such a 

 British camp was simple; it consisted in a furious simultaneous 

 onslaught on the entrenchment in two different places. The Roman 

 castellum (a diminutive of castrum), when planted in the neighbour- 

 hood of a British oppidum, was a fortified position generally at some 

 distance— sometimes as much as two or three miles away from it 

 Such an oppidum was Barbury Castle, and such a castellum probably 

 was the intrenchment first described in this notice. The term castle 

 seems, in its application to a hill-fort, to have been transferred in 

 later parlance from a neighbouring Roman settlement to what 

 was originally a British Dun or Caer and afterwards an English 

 Burh; which, indeed, not unfrequently (as at Marlborough and 

 Ludgershall) became the site of a Norman castle. It has been 

 supposed that the earliest form of these hill-forts was that of a single 

 agger, with its foss— fossa et terreus agger—like the old (supposed) 

 Belgian boundary, the Wansdyke, and many other so-called walls 

 and dykes; and that the double mound and ditch and the scarping 

 of hill sides were the work of later and, probably, of Anglo-Saxon 

 engineers. This may have been so with some of the great entrenched 

 works of ancient Wessex like Sidbury and Old Sarum; but it is not 

 hkely that many of these doubly-mounded entrenchments were 



