56 



Westbury under the Plain. 



that a commander-in-chief, anxious to pounce unexpectedly on an 

 enemy, should occupy a whole day from dawn to get over five or six 

 miles, and then go to sleep again within sight of his enemy at 

 Bratton. Moreover, if the Danish general, being in Bratton Camp, 

 saw that Alfred and his army had reached Cley Hill, and were close 

 upon him, he would surely never have come out of his stronghold on 

 the hill, but would have kept snug behind his rampart, and let Alfred 

 turn him out if he could. And there is another circumstance which 

 has always stood in the way of accepting your Edington as the place. 

 Soon after the battle, Alfred prevailed upon the Danish leader to 

 change his faith and be publicly baptized in a Church, which was 

 done. Was it in Edington or Bratton Church ? In neither ; but 

 at Aller. Now Aller, in Somersetshire, is the nearest Church to 

 that other Edington at which Bishop Clifford fixes the Battle of 

 iEthandun. There is certainly no white horse there \ nor, according 

 to another, and a rather increasing number of archaeologists, was 

 there any reason to expect one ; because, according to their opinion, 

 these ancient figures of horses in conspicuous places had nothing 

 whatever to do with any battles in the time of King Alfred, but 

 had been displayed on the hill side, weather-beaten, scoured or 

 unscoured, as the case might be, for centuries before Alfred was born. 

 These writers consider them to have been emblems connected with 

 the superstitious religion of the old Britons. On the original 

 rudely- cut horse at Bratton there was a crescent attached to the 

 horse : and it is very remarkable that a crescent accompanies the 

 figure of a rudely-cut horse upon ancient British coins. Dr. Phene, 

 a learned foreigner, in writing upon these subjects tells us, in one 

 of his papers, just issued, that he has made them almost the sole 

 study of his life ; for he has spent no less than thirty years in 

 travelling all over the world to search for and examine these strange 

 emblems of animals. They are most frequently found in earthworks, 

 mounds, and banks, heaped up in the shape of an elephant, dragon, 

 serpent, or the like. He assigns to them all a strange religious 

 origin, and very great antiquity. I lately read in some magazine 

 article (the reference to which I have unfortunately mislaid) that in 

 a work on "Travels in Central America/' the author mentions his 



