35£ Notes on the Border of Wilts and Hants. 



the tides,, eddies, currents, and whirlpools of that ancient sea. The 

 beautifully-curved lines that give such graceful swells and dips to 

 the downs were all produced by the action of water gradually 

 retiring from higher to lower ground. If the Atlantic were dried 

 up to-morrow, we should find a surface as various, as in the present 

 surface of our terra fir ma. I do not think that the dykes and banks 

 at Downton were originally made by the hands and spades of men : 

 though they may have been utilized, and altered } just as the lynchets 

 have been. 1 



This place is called the Moot, which is an old Saxon word for an 

 assembly. We have still the name, in Witena,-gemot, the meeting 

 o£ wise men for the kingdom : the shire-mote for the county : the 

 folk-mote for the hundred. In some places a town-hall is called 

 the moot-hall. Now there is one part of this curious place, which 

 certainly would do very well for oratorical purposes : especially for 

 an assembly shaped like the French Chamber of Deputies, or a 

 theatre, both of which are of the horseshoe form. There are six 

 broad and long grass banks one behind another, and gradually 

 rising one above another, which certainly look for all the world as 

 if they had been made on purpose for people to sit upon, to listen to 

 somebody standing on the level stage below, in front of them. 

 That a speaker can be heard very well I am able to testify, having 

 tried it. Visiting the place with some friends they took their 

 seats on the top row, as far back as possible, whilst I stood, on the 

 flat, as it were at the back of the " stage/'' and recited a few lines 

 from some poet. They assured me that they heard every syllable 

 quite distinctly. 



It is now very difficult to trace the shape of this singular spot, 

 it has been so much altered and disguised by trees and shrubs in 

 transforming it into a beautiful pleasure-ground. 



The Bishops of Winchester, as Lords of the Hundred and Manor 



1 A woodcut of the Moot, with description, will be found in Mr. Gr. T. Clark's 

 paper (" The Earthworks of the Wiltshire Avon ") in Journal of Archaeological 

 Institute, vol. xxxii., p. 305. Also in the late E. T. Stevens's " Jotttings on the 

 Moot Excursion," 1876, p. 31 (Bennett, Salisbury). 



