54 



Westbury under the Plain. 



however, another kind of fog, always surrounding" these objects, 

 through which it is by no means easy to see one's way : and that 

 is, their real history. Our friend Mr. Plenderleath is the White 

 Horse champion, and has taken the subject under his special pro- 

 tection in an interesting little book, which probably many of you 

 may have read. He has a whole team of them to deal with, for 

 there are, I believe, no less than eight in the county of Wilts alone, 

 besides one or two in the North of England : and I see by the 

 programme that he has something more to say about them. There 

 are only two out of our eight that have any claim to antiquity : the 

 two I have just mentioned ; and even of these two the one on Bratton 

 Hill is only a second edition, the original figure, which was of more 

 antique shape, having been destroyed by a land agent a little more 

 than a hundred years ago. All the rest are not old horses, but only 

 young colts, set up to prance on the hill sides, some of them within 

 the memory of man. Some years ago one of our farmers was asking 

 me about these things, what they meant? I told him the little I 

 knew, how old some were said to be : but as to the one at Marl- 

 borough I did not know how old that one was. " Oh," said he, " I 

 can tell 'ee that, for I helped to make him. We boys at Mr. 

 Gresley's school worked at it." One opinion, perhaps the one most 

 generally held, about the old white horses, is that they were cut out 

 upon the turf to commemorate a great victory ; and it is certainly 

 a historical fact that King Alfred did win a battle against the 

 Danes, at Ashdown, near the Berkshire white horse. And it is 

 also a historical fact that he did defeat them again at another place 

 called iEthandun, which is interpreted by many archaeologists to be 

 your Edington. It is entirely beyond the limits of this paper to go 

 into all the details of the discussion to which this has given rise : 

 for there are no less than six places that compete for the honour of 

 being the very identical spot on which Alfred crushed for a time 

 the power of the Danes in this country. What makes it so difficult 

 to decide the point is, that every one of those places has a name 

 sufficiently like iEthandun, and, further, every one of them has also 

 a strong hill fortress close at hand to which the defeated might 

 have fled, as in the history of the event, written at the time, they 



