8 



The Twenty -Eighth General Meeting. 



to which an individual character could be attributed. But on the 

 other hand the further you get back the truer does the converse of 

 this proposition become, till in our own case we arrive at a period 

 when this County was simply the territory which a particular West 

 Saxon tribe had occupied, forming- an Under-Kingdom, which 

 ultimately was made a separate scir or shire, and later on came to be 

 called a County. The history of Wiltshire begins in fact with the 

 period when our victorious Teutonic ancestors, the Wilscetas, 

 expelled the Celtic inhabitants and established here the outposts of 

 the West Saxon Kingdom. I say the " outposts," for although the 

 capital was at Winchester, it was around these North Wiltshire 

 downs that the great military struggles for supremacy in Southern 

 England took place, and on their possession more than once did it 

 depend whether this country was to be Saxon or British, and later 

 on whether or no the Danes were to supplant the English. And 

 here the student of geography would make his voice heard in order 

 to point out how much the course of history depends on the great 

 natural features of a country. It' needs no reflection to understand 

 that the possession of a district in which the head waters of the 

 rivers flowing into the German Ocean, the Channel, and the Severn 

 respectively, can be reached in a hard day's ride, must always have 

 been a matter of vital importance to any invader desiring to hold 

 Southern England. The history of this county began then with 

 the settlements of a conquering Saxon tribe by the stream which 

 the Britons called Guilou — the clear stream — and we the Wily, 

 around the town of Wilton. Southern Wiltshire is in fact older than 

 Northern Wiltshire. The tribe in question came to be called the 

 Wilscetas, and the district around, Wilset. Their conquests were 

 difficult and slowly made. It was up the valley of the Itch en, between 

 the two great forests, the relics of which are still with us in the New 

 Forest and the forest of the Sussex Weald, that the Saxons, leaving 

 North Germany, struck into Southern England. They took Win- 

 chester, it would seem, with comparative ease, but their first advance 

 upon Wiltshire was for a time decisively checked by the great victory 

 which tradition asserts to have been gained somewhere in the second 

 decade of the sixth century by King Arthur at Mount Badon, a 



