The Twenty -Eighth General Meeting. 



been extended northward into the valley of the Somersetshire Avon^ 

 that the same tribes or families which had settled in the valleys of the 

 Southern Avon, the Nadder and the Wily, were those who bore the 

 most prominent part in the northern conquest, and that the bound- 

 aries of what we call Wiltshire thus came to be gradually established, 

 first, probably in the reign of Ine, the lawgiver, and finally, in the 

 time of Alfred, according to the tradition preserved by the Wiltshire 

 historian, William of Malmesbury, after the final repulse of the 

 Danes from Southern England : a repulse determined by a great 

 battle fought on the skirts of the North Wiltshire Downs, upon 

 much the same ground as that where the final struggle between the 

 Saxon and the Celt had before been determined, whatever the exact 

 site may have been. Thus, in the case of Wiltshire, and it may 

 be added, in the case of four of the other shires carved out of 

 the old West Saxon Kingdom, viz., Somersetshire, Devonshire, 

 Berkshire and Dorsetshire, we find the limits of the county deter- 

 mined by the settlements of invading tribes, and not grouped 

 around any town bearing a cognate name. Indeed, Berkshire and 

 Devonshire have no cognate town at all, while Somerset and Dorset, 

 which have cognate towns, are not called after them. On the 

 other hand, it would appear that in the case of Wiltshire, as of 

 Hampshire, although the county was not grouped around the town, 

 nevertheless the county was named after it, and Mr, Freeman accounts 

 in this manner for the t in the modern form " Wiltshire." The case 

 of the counties north of the Thames and in central England 

 generally, was widely different. The Danish invasion destroyed the 

 old divisions, and after the Danish conquest the land was divided 

 again either by the Danish rulers, or again at a later date by the 

 English Kings after the re-conquest, and the counties being mere 

 administrative divisions were always grouped round a central town. 



Such, then, is our county in its origin, an old Saxon Under- King- 

 dom gradually becoming an administrative division of the great 



sustained. It was the special merit of Mr. J. E. Green, to have popularized the 

 study, and to have brought home to many the comprehension of the fact that 

 without archaeology true history could not be written. 



