38 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
everyday life. Primitive races did not — any more than modern 
man — divide the sum total of their existence between fighting and 
burying, with an occasional excursus into religious ceremonial ; 
and yet the traditional fashion of the antiquary has been to 
classify the relics of their lives and practices almost exclusively 
under one or other of these heads. There is hardly a single cause 
which has led to so much confusion in the interpretation of our 
early history as the unfortunate error of nomenclature which has 
indiscriminately ranked the earthworks scattered throughout the 
country as hill-forts, camps, and castles, whereas the immense 
majority are simply the enclosures of the ancient villages or towns 
— differing in no essential feature from the older pound villages of 
Dartmoor save in their somewhat more defensible position, the 
substitution of earthen mound for stone wall, and the disappearance 
of the wattled huts, which, having no enduring foundations, left 
"not a wrack behind." That a few of the so-called camps were 
fortresses in the special sense no one can or will deny ; but that 
the larger number are the evidence, not of long continued or 
desperate warfare, but of settled and comparatively dense popula- 
tion, I am firmly convinced. 
It is surprising, for example, how it can ever have been thought 
that the vast mounds of Clovelly Dikes, the finest earthwork in 
the county, could be thrown up for casual occupation in the 
imminent presence of danger, or by anything less than the united 
efforts of a powerful tribe. This is an extreme case, but in its 
degree the same line of argument applies to scores of other 
instances. We have in them the evidence of concentrated working 
towards a permanent end, throughout periods of comparative 
quiescence, and not the hurried device of scattered races struggling 
for bare existence with their fellows or — the favourite hypothesis — 
— with an invading foe, strong enough to beat them from hill-top 
to hill-top, but unable to follow up a victory by a final blow. 
The attempt has been made to classify the ancient earthworks 
by their shapes, and assign them to Kelt, Eoman, Dane, or Saxon ; 
but the results are of little value. The square form, attributed 
with good ground to the Eomans, is in this district the rarest of 
the rare ; and as a rule the lines simply follow the contour of the 
ground. 
These earthworks have not been largely productive of traces of 
occupation ; but probably this is rather because they have not 
