274 



Selwood Forest. 



demolished, and the inhabitants of the street which connects the 

 two to have forsaken, or to have been driven away from, their homes, 

 or, perhaps, to have removed the materials, to build the New Town 

 on another site, and that all the vaults and cellars of the Old Town 

 had been left; gaping holes in the ground, never filled up and 

 levelled ; the general appearance of the Old Town, after the lapse 

 of sixteen hundred years would have been not much unlike the old 

 hill fortress of Penselwood, the smaller fortress at the foot of the 

 hill, and the Pen Pits between them. 



But it is impossible in a short paper to discuss this question fully. 

 Those who may take an interest in it should read with care Mr. 

 Kerslake's publications, as well as those that are adverse to his 

 views. 1 



The choice, as to what the Pen Pits really were, seems to be 

 this. They were either quarries or the sites of ancient habitation. 

 The former appears to myself untenable : and Mr. Kerslake's view 

 more likely to be the true one. 



I have dwelt upon this part of my subject perhaps rather too 

 long, but it is really the only thing I have to say about Selwood in 

 the very darkest period. 



We must now leave this obscure atmosphere, and pass to another 

 not quite so dark, but still dark enough. You must skip over a 

 trifle of a few hundred years, during which the name of Selwood is 

 never met with. What is the reason of these long silent blanks? 

 We have no local information because either nobody took the trouble 

 to write it, or, if they did, it has perished. The most likely persons 

 to write it were, of course, the monks in the monasteries. But we 

 have a curious bit of testimony from one of them, who had a turn 

 for history and topography, that though he desired to write he was 

 stopped by his Superior. This would-be writer's name was Richard 

 of Cirencester. About 1350 he was a monk in the great abbey 



1 Mr. Kerslake's views are contained in three pamphlets :— " A Primeval 

 British Metropolis," 1877; "Caer Pensauel coit, a long lost un-Romanised 

 British Metropolis, a Re-assertion, with a Map," 1882; " The Liberty of inde- 

 pendent Historical Research," 1885. The adverse opinion is to be found in 

 two reports in Somersetshire Archaeological Society's Proceedings, and one by 

 Lt.-Gen. Pitt-Rivers, F.R.S. J 



