10 



The Twenty -Eighth General Meeting. 



worth while to observe that the antagonists of the Saxons con- 

 sisted of two very different bodies: there were, first, the citizens 

 of the walled Romano-British towns, such as Calleva, the modern 

 Silchester ; Cunetio, our own Marlborough ; and Verlucio, the site of 

 which was near Calne : towns in which much of the old civilization 

 had remained, and which themselves the objects of the hostility of the 

 native tribes, ever since the withdrawal of the Romans, had been 

 rapidly relapsing into complete barbarism. Both alike were, however, 

 now threatened with a common overthrow by the new invader, and the 

 deeds of King Arthur and the more real figure of Aurelius Ambrosius, 

 are the legendary embodiment of the attempts of some native king, 

 superior in energy and attainments to his fellows, to unite these 

 scattered and discordant elements in an effective resistance. 



Now I have got as far as this, that before the end of the sixth 

 century Southern and Central Wiltshire were in Saxon hands. You 

 may think that the conquest of the remainder, when once the Northern 

 Downs were in the hands of the invader, must have been easy 

 work. But it was not so. North-west Wiltshire was at that time a 

 huge mass of tangled forest and marsh, Blackmore, Pewsham, 

 Braden, Selwood, are names we all know, though all reality has 

 departed from them. But then they existed, and therefore our 

 ancestors, for nearly a century after the events I have described, 

 pushed east and south, but not north and west, and even after they 

 had occupied the Cotswolds, they shunned the dense forests below, 

 which for a long time separated their possessions from each other 

 like a huge wedge. It appears that it was the loss of much of their 

 eastern possessions to rival Anglian tribes, more than any other 

 event, which ultimately induced the Saxons to master, as some com- 

 pensation, this inhospitable tract, the conquest of which is of peculiar 

 interest to this meeting owing to its bearing on the town where we are. 

 I borrow the account from the pages of Mr. J. R. Green. " Barred 

 from any further advance to the north, they saw even their progress 

 westward threatened by the presence of Mercia on the lower Avon ; 

 and it was as much to preserve their one remaining field of conquest 

 as to compensate for the retreat of their frontier in other quarters 

 that Cen wealth marched on this northernmost fastness of Dyvnaint. 



