The following text was written in 1922 ,now over 100 years ago

Dumnonia and Glaston.
DUMMONIA, therefore, as a geographical term, seems to lie in the background of our national, and especially West-Country, annals, at a some what dim and uncertain region, regarded as a hall fabulous realm, not to be defined by modern rounder or by modern Bishopries, although the name has survived in Devon. It has long since dropped out of use and find little mention in our text books. William of Malmesbury could say “ In Dumnonia quae Devenscire dicitur " and render himself intelligible to man of his own age, 1143 ; and, further book still in our history, Asser, the biographer of King Alfred, could quote “ Dumnonia,” as already noted, probably meaning Devon and part of Somerset reaching up to the Parrett mouth and, perhaps, further cast still, towards Bristol a.d. 875-900, that there was a Church, if not a distinct Diocese in Dumnonia, we may infer from a letter written by Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne in a d 704 who gave a kind of pastoral charge to Gerontius, King of Dumnonia, and to all priests, sacerdotes, living in Dumnonia. The view of Aldhelm. who was partially Romanized, was that Dumnonia was rather uncivilized dim, a view we need not endorse, as he probably meant that the Celtic Church was not sufficiently imbued with Roman and papal influences. The old Roman geographers used the name of Dumnonia and had a definition for it, Claudius Ptolemaeus a d 150 placing the Dumnonii next to the Durotriges or Dorsaetas, i e men of Dorset, on the east, and extending this region to “ Volida,”  i e Fowey or Falmouth in Cornwall. He gave them Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter) and Caerleon. On the Coast of Somerset Dumnonia included Uxella on the Axe, and Uphill above Brean.

This certainly would include “ Anchor Head ” on the present site of Weston-super-Mare with the old fort of Worlesborough above it. It is worth noticing that a later Roman geographer, Caius Julius Solinus, a d 238, extended the Dumnonii much further up the Severn and placed them opposite to the Silures.
Doctor Guest in his “ Origines Celticae,” conjectures that the bounds of Dumnonia stretched from Malmesbury to the Land’s End and that the kings of Dumnonia had added to this realm by conquest and that, in the days of Gereint. Dumnonia must have been in power and dignity the first of the British Kingdoms. He writes, “ It is not my object to trace the several stages of decay through which the power of Dumnonia passed as it melted away before the ascendancy of England. The more intimate relations of this British Kingdom were no doubt with the kindred races of Wales and Brittany, but the influences it exercised over the national progress and even over the literature of its English neighbours were by no means of slight account, though they have been a strangely overlooked. They afford, I think, the only solution of some of the most intricate problems connected with our early history, and materials for such inquiry may be scanty, but they are not altogether wanting. The three chief “perpetual choirs” of the Isle of Britain were : 1, That of Llan Iltud Vawr in Glamorgan, 2, That of Ambrosius in Ambresbury, near Salisbury, 3 That of Glaston. In each of these choirs there were 2,400, that is there were one hundred for every hour of the day and night in rotation perpetuating the praise of God without rest or intermission. What may be termed the spiritual life of an enlarged Dumnonia was centred around these places about a d 500. This implied a kind of national unity from Salisbury to the Land’s End. When, later on, the Bishopric of Sherborne was formed and Aldhehn ruled over “ Seiwoodshire,” this inland continuity from Wiltshire westward was slightly impaired about a d 700. But Dumnonia unity was preserved along the north coasts and littoral of the Severn Sea, being in its very nature maritime and its inhabitants sea fairing. Glaston and Llan Iltud Vawr preserved their Celtic traditions. It was a matter of navigation, and of a sea and river intercourse, easier in its way than travel through inland forests and less perilous.

That road or highway, possibly of Roman origin, linking Dumnonia and its northern parts together, leading from Bristol and Bath westward to Uxella or Axbridge and Brent and so to Cynwith or Comwith passage on the Parrett was first constructed with a strategic and maritime purpose. It was the trunk road of ancient Dumnonia for all purposes. It helped the pilgrim also on his way to Glaston and was connected with all land routes and especially with the sea routes across Severn. Glaston also had its river anchorages, its canals and moorland boats,or batelli and river craft. The tidal wave swept humble currough or larger barge and vessel up to its sacred portals. If we adopt Sir Charles Elton’s definitions of ancient Siluria and infer that it meant a block of Wales including Glamorgan and Hereford, as well as Monmouth, it will be seen that the Dumnonii must have been found some distance up the Severn. Bath and Bristol (Bristowa, the town of the British); both with churches dedicated to St. Michael, would have been occupied by them. Gildas, our oldest historian, who knew the Severn well, mentions a certain “ King of Dumnonia ” Constantine by name, Dumnoniae tyrannus, as apart from Vortipore, King of Demetia which we assume to mean geographically, South Wales and not simply Pembroke. The name of Constantine, it may be noted, introduces early Christian association 300-400. To-day there is a Cornish parish near Falmouth called Constantine where it is said (although the rumour cannot be substantiated) silver coins of Arthur were found near the church. Constantine, also,

                  was the name of a King in Scotland, who gave tip his Crown and lived as a recluse amongst the Culdees or regular “ clerici ” of Saint. Andrew, a d 943, the name thus serving as a link between Cornwall and Scotland. For centuries, since the days of Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine, the name has been interwoven in British annals. Constantine appears in the Arthurian genealogies, and one of that name is reputed grandfather of Rex Arturus himself. The first Council of Arles (a.d. 314) took place under the auspices and during the reign of Constantine the Great. At this Council Eborius, bishop of York, Restitutus, bishop of London, and Adelfius, bishop of Caerleon, attended. Silvester, bishop of Rome, was not present, but he was, treateda, "par inter pares”, and is addressed by assembled bishops as “most beloved brother”, in a letter sent to him. This period of Church History is most interesting and the British ; traditions were passed on to the Saxon Kings in due course of time who claimed a kind of spiritual inheritance with the British Crown. King Edgar, the descendant of Ina and Alfred, said, “I have the sword of Constantine,” with reference to his task of clearing away some abuses that had crept into the Church. Constantine’s traditions were not Papal or Benedictine and take us far back to pure and unsullied pages of our Church history. These were eastern rather than western. St. Jerome writing with a direct reference to the remote British Church said “ The Britons who live apart from our world, if they go on a pilgrimage, will leave the western parts and seek Jerusalem, known to them by fame only and by the Scriptures.” Doctor Challoner, a Roman Catholic historian in his “ Britannia Sancta ” of 1745 endorses the report that Saint Teilo, a Welshman and great traveller, was consecrated by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He calls Dubricius Archbishop of Caerleon, and says that he ordained S. Samson and S. Theliau.
This throws a light upon the Cornish and Welsh Churches. There is a hint also of that ancient evangelisation as typified by the teaching of Saint Piranus, or Saint Kieran where, even up to late years, at Perranzabuloe, the Cornish tinners have kept his feast and held a fair on the same day near his church. Close by is Saint Piranus’s well, useful for the cure of diseases and, not far off, Saint Piranus’s Round, one of the ancient Cornish amphitheatres for the celebration of games. By these means for centuries the existence of the old church has been kept alive. Christianity came to Severn waters first as a seed born at random by the winds of heaven, tended and watered by the hands of loving converts by the banks, it might be, of the Usk, Tavy or Wye; thence it was transplanted by Celtic sailor saints to distant shores, spread by the zeal of devoted missionaries till the time of Saint Augustine when Pope Gregory reached out his hand to reap the harvest of 597. The subject of the influences of the East filtering through from Palestine, Asia Minor, and so to Marseilles and Gaul is a wide and interesting one, replete with historical suggestions and touching the Celtic Church. The very words “ church,” “ ecclesia,” “ episcopacy,” “ priest,” “ deacon,” “ Bible,” “ monk,” “ eremite or hermit,” “ caenobite,” “ coenobium,” “ abbot,” and many others were taken over in all probability, straight from the east and not through the medium of Rome. Papal Rome introduced other and different influences and this period may be said to begin roughly speaking, with the mission of Saint Augustine. Upon that long and antecedent Romano-British period lasting up to a d 600 we should have hailed less fragmentary historians than Gildas and Nennius and welcomed definite information of a direct kind. Here are some of the darkest pages of our Christian annals. But in reality, the Celtic Church gives us quite enough to prove its original character and meaning. Christian truth was drawn from such springs as that of Saint Piranus and the waters were pure. Baptism in such water was sufficient. Signs there were in abundance of the greatness of Imperial, not Papal Rome, still left in the land, lasting till the days of Giraldus Cambrensis, in the twelfth century, who waxed eloquent over the existing remnants of the old Imperial civilisation at Caerleon where the “ Second Legion ” was quartered. Here were ruins of great palaces, beautiful baths, remnants of temples, theatres, walls, hypocausts and a huge tower rising above the waters of the Usk.

The palaces with gilt roofs imitated the Roman pride as built by Roman masters. In addition to noble ruins and works of advanced civilisation, Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars, the mistress of the then known world from the Euphrates and Persia in the east, up to furthest Britain in the west, bequeathed to the Dumnonii and Silures, and, indeed to Britannia generally, the idea of a ruling caste and a "Stirps Romana.” It was not exactly dynastic nor was it hereditary. The trail of the Imperial purple was too glorious to be forgotten. if Julius Caesar himself had never come as far west as Dumnonia and Wales, Vespasian and Titus the conquerors of Jerusalem in a d 70 had brought her cohorts thither, and, as Sir John Rhys surmises, had fought and subdued the Belgae and Dumnonians who occupied nearly the whole south-west of Britain. “ Vespasian’s camp ” is still so called in Somerset. Sir Francis Palgrave has aptly said that the Dominion of the Bretwaldas began by being an imitation of the Imperial sovereignty of Rome. Ethelbert impressed the Roman wolf upon his rude Kentish coins. The exaltation of this idea was surely nowhere more conspicuous than in “ Britannia Prima ” and “ Britannia Secunda.” Therefore when the last Roman legionary left Caerleon Roman Imperial sovereignty might have terminated, but the world-wide prestige of it survived and nowhere more than in Dumnonia. The legacy was imperishable. Imperial Rome bequeathed also the Latin language the “ lingua franca” of the world. It must be always remembered that this language came to Britain through two main conduits or channels; the one preceding Saint Augustine, and the other afterwards ; the one flowing directly from Imperial Rome the other from Papal and generally Monkish and Benedictine sources. The earlier period attracts our attention and it belongs more to classical than to post-classical times, until we get to the jargon best illustrated in words and phrases found in Du Cange’s Glossary of “Mediae et infimae Latinitatis.” Naturally on a question of this sort, although we must not look for a Cicero or Livy in Britain it looks as if classical words and phrases taken over by the Dumnonii and all the Waelas as a direct legacy of Roman conquest were preserved with care. Monmouth and Caerleon may have been a centre where, if anywhere, Latin idioms were taught and written. Gildas was the first historian of the Severn Sea. In the Welsh language such words as castrum, in Welsh Caer were preserved: also vallum in welsh gwal; pons in welsh pont; portus in Welsh porth; murus (W. mur); Foss (W. fos); insula (ynys as ynys witrin or insula Avalonia and elsewhere); mons (W. mynedd) ; turris (W. tor) ; palus (W. pawl) ; mare (W. mor) and to these anchora, aestuarium, zabulum, sand, as in Perran zabuloe, might be added. Such words go back to the first occupation by Imperial Rome. The Saxons, Angles and Jutes were different from the Dumnonii. They came, first of all, as a savage and unlettered people from the shores of the North Sea; such, indeed, as Boniface, the apostle of Germany, found the Frisians in his day (a.d. 700).

They received Christianity through the medium of the already converted British and, when they came west, they met the Dumnonii who were, as already pointed out, “ humaniores,” i.e. more civilized in manners, customs and general habits of life and thought. After the Roman legionaries had departed and the secular rule of Rome was over (a.d. 400-500) there was found in the land a residuum of Romano-British, especially in Wales and on the shores of the Severn and Severn estuary; people who were the off spring of the union between the official residents of Roman extraction and the native British population. Naturally, these preserved, more than the rest, the glitter and fame of the Imperial City. From this point of view the name of Claudia, the Christian wife of Pudens, an early convert to the faith, (if we may credit the story), is more interesting than even the name of Bertha the wife of Ethelbert (a.d. 600), daughter of Haribert, King of the Franks who helped to introduce Christianity at St. Martin’s Church, Canterbury, where St. Augustine preached.
The Saxons, although virile invaders, lacked in themselves the ideas of Imperial lineage and of noble and illustrious ancestry, such indeed, as Rome in those days alone could give. They were “ novi homines ” and they strengthened their position by allying themselves with the Romano-British strain and the British chiefs. Indeed on the question of Crowns and prestige the headship or Paramount chieftainship of the British tribes were termed a “ Benedicta Corona ” as if it carried not only fame, but also some invisible blessing as a Christian Crown. This idea appealed most strongly to King Ina (688), the greatest of Saxon kings in Dumnonia after King Alfred. He was the restorer and benefactor of Glaston, the creator of Sherborne, (Bishop Aldhelm being his kinsman), and the founder of Wells, if we may follow this entry in the documents of Wells Cathedral—(“ To the poor at the obit of King Ina, the original founder of the Church.”) The very fierceness and intensity of the Saxon nation which displayed itself originally in the fury of war and combat,
became, under the spell of Christianity, ardent and enthusiastic in promoting the Christian cause. The unsurpassed annals of Imperial Rome, like the trunk or bole of a stately tree over shadowing the world, magnified the later pretensions of Papal Rome grafted upon it by the cunning skill of the teachers, and the Saxons were not instructed enough or learned enough to distinguish the difference between branch and bole. How, indeed, could they ? How could they follow the policy and reasoning that made the “ Pontifex Maximus ” of the old Roman Republic “ the Pontiff ” and Spiritual Head of the whole world ? King Alfred could know and appreciate the vast difference between Imperial Rome and later Papal Rome, especially from his own experiences in the ninth century, but not King Ina, who humbly laid down his “ Benedicta Corona ” and died a monk at Rome, No doubt King Alfred’s personal insight into the inner history of Papal Rome in his century was sufficiently enlightening in itself and turned him back (as we shall see it did) in quest of the purer and more simple ideals of the Celtic Church under Asser.
Ancient Dumnonia, a realm without an earthly Capital, scattered widely along the edges of the profound ocean seems, in the absence of exact chronicles, to involve in its meaning a kind of past spiritual sphere and influence recalling the age of Perranzabuloe, i.e. “ St. Pieran on the sand,” in Cornwall, or, indeed, that of old William of Worcester’s reputed 140 churches, with lands extending from St. Michael’s Mount
towards the Scilly Islands, once flourishing now lying beneath the ocean.

The bells seem to ring, fathoms deep, like the bells of Forrabury, and to the believing ear some sound floats up from the waves. Nevertheless, there is tangible reason for believing in this unrecorded realm of the past. A stranger wandering along the shores of Glamorgan and over the region of Kenfig, swept by storms may, in the titter wilderness caused by nature and nature’s floods, recognise in a similar fashion, a former reality, when church towers and castles and even manor houses and tenements, raised up their heads. To-day there is nothing to be seen but seagulls, nothing to be heard but the wild note of the curlew. Along the estuary of the Parret, at such a place as the Botestall, the old Saxon name for an anchorage at the river’s mouth, a strange noise can often be heard like the uncertain tolling of a bell sounding from beyond the great mud spaces, where, centuries ago, it is said grew a great forest, now submerged. Here, as off St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, according to William of Worcester, lands have been stolen and kept by the waves, encroaching age after age and, with the aid of storms and tempests winning for Father Neptune new regions to his sway. The tolling bell at the Parret’s mouth sounds like a kind of requiem over dead spaces, fitful and uncertain, as if struck at random and by some unseen hand in concert with the fluctuation of wind and wave. In truth, this Parret bell, suggestive as it is in the realms of fancy and, (especially in the glimmering of evening’s growing darkness),a weird incomprehensible sound—is a modem reality and

serves a real purpose. It is a bell-buoy warning vessels off the proximity of the Gore sands and of the wreck of the Murker. Fancy can draw round it what tales it likes of departed realms and vanished church towers as at Kenfig or St. Michael’s Mount. Who, indeed can set bounds now to the ancient annals of Kenfig ? Who, indeed, can picture the old world activities of the harbour of Forth Kerry or Forth Cerig, founded by St. Cerig for the benefit of the souls of the sailors ? Behind the ancient anchorage lingers the vision of ancient activities.

Barry Docks seem to dwarf the little ventures of the past but there is some soul behind the life of St. Baruc; more history than we know of behind the names of SS. Cyricus and Juletta at Caerleon itself. Some may say that it is a kingdom of romance you are invoking; some shadow of Arthurian realm; some “ simulacrum ” of a history dear to such a fanciful annalist as Geoffrey of Monmouth or to the dreamer who wanders by those triple banks and escarpments of Cadbury—down which King Arthur’s steed, shod in silver tramps in moonlight! Very beautiful! and very, very romantic ! but not history! In spite of all this there is a temptation to cling to some kind of golden age of inspiration; to some primitive story that, apart from all its dressing and antique clothing, means something real in the spiritual and religious world, for the Dumnonii were Christians long before the uncouth Saxons, and Dumnonia was a vast Christian sphere, if not a mapped out Diocese, long before Aldhelm ruled at Sherborne in that Province which was termed “ Seiwoodshire ”; or long before a Bishop of Devonshire had his “ Bishop’s Settle,” first at Tawton, and then at Crediton ; or long before indeed, a Bishop of Bath and Wells lived at Wells. In speaking of Dumnonia we cannot think along sterotyped lines. Bishoprics are subsequent definitions, ancient as many of them are. We think more of Abbots and Monasteries, of wandering sailor Saints, of the first glimmerings of Christian light and inspiration ; or of stone-roofed cells like Maedara’ oratory off the Galway coast; of watery wildernesses; of lonely perches of eremites and coenobites; not of stately Gothic Architecture. Above all, in looking for the heart and spiritual centre of wide and extra-parochial Dumnonia the eye rests at last upon Glaston and the reputed site of the wattled cell. Mr. Rowland Prothero (Lord Ernie) in his book on “ The Psalms in Human Life ” has pointed out how wide the wanderings of the early Celtic saints and how great their zeal: “ Now, in the spirit of Antony and the anchorites of the Egyptian Desert, the storm-beaten islands of the Atlantic Ocean were tenanted by eager solitaries who, by day and night, from year’s end to year’s end, amid the roar of the waves and the wild screams of sea-birds, sang the Psalms to God. Now, in another aspect of the same religious fervour, men left their wattled chapels, their stone oratories, and wooden shrines in Ireland and Scotland to carry the Gospel message to the heathen. Columban at Luxeuil and Bobbio, Gall in Switzerland, Cataldus at Tarentum, Virgilius at Salzburg, Donatus at Fiesole, were among the Celtic Saints who made their influence felt in Western Europe from Iceland to Southern Italy.” Of these Saints Columban was remembered at the old chapel of St. Columban in the ancient Forest of Cheddar1 and also at Culbone, near Porlock ; St. Donatus at St. Donats in Glamorgan and also at Doniford near Watchet in Somerset. The work and zeal of these missionaries were not impaired by the burden of too much dress and ritual; by the growing by the latter day accretions of non-scriptural doctrines. They carried with them the volume of Canonical Law; or Bible only and the simple story 0f the Cross of Christ.

Contrast indeed, some modern methods of African conversion. Main issues have been blinded by irrelevant matters. Colenso controversies and Kikuyu disputes have not helped the cause of the simple Gospels. Could the arguable difficulties of the Pentateuch save or lose a Zulu soul ? Even Cardinal Lavigerie, the modern “ Apostle of Algeria,” had to carry somewhat reluctantly, we believe, the burden of the late Wells Doctrine of Papal infallibility into African sands. He would have been wise if he had dropped it there as an African mirage. In the History of Christianity a useful thesis might be propounded as to whether the great cause was in the past helped more by continental advocates or by British and Celtic Saints ? A survey of events might show that Europe owes more to British Islands than the British Islands to Europe.

Herein lies a deep and far-reaching historical question. Perhaps a study of such a work as Lord Bryce’s “ Holy Roman Empire ” might help us and show how ineffectual the fleeting reigns of Popes and Emperors. In Elizabethan time the good old British ship had, under the superintendance of Jewel and others, to jettison a lot of medieval lumber and to have the keel cleared of medieval barnacles, but the ship was the same under proper pilots. In the annals of British Christianity the Psalms were a great source of inspiration and an instrument of teaching. The great Columba of Iona made them his “ vade mecum ” and took them always with him as his most valued possession. It is said that he obtained his copy from Finnian and that he copied it by stealth. Hence there was a dispute as to the rightful possession of the copy and a battle amongst the clans known as “ The Battle of the Psalter ” and under the name of Cathac or “ The Battler,” the O’ Donnells, for centuries carried to their battles the silver case containing Columba’s reputed copy of the Psalter as a pledge of victory. Saint Cuthbert, the spiritual descendant of St. Columba is said to have died to the refrain of the sixtieth Psalm. King Alfred, inheriting the inspiration of the Psalms always carried with him in the folds of his garments a little book with extracts from the Psalms and a daily course, the beginning of his “ Enchiridion ” or Handbook, as Asser tells us. On the eve of the battle of Edington St. Neot appeared to King Alfred and promised victory. “ The Lord shall be with you : even the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle who giveth victory unto Kings.” (Psalm xxiv, 8). In the Welsh colleges the use of the word “ Cor ” (choir, chorus) and Bangor (high choir) may point to an antiphonal singing of the Psalms. It was with a Psalm that Gwynlliu, the warrior, father of Cadoc was converted from the life of violence to that of an anchorite. He is commemorated at St. Woollos the patron Saint of Newport, Monmouthshire. In the picturesque life of Patrick the Saint, with his twelve Priests and the boy, Benignus (of Glaston fame), is said to have vanquished the Druids at that notable meeting at Tara by chanting the Psalm “ Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses ; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.”

As Ireland has been so often quoted as the nursery of Celtic Evangelisation it is an interesting question, left doubtful and ambiguous in the past, as to the influence of Glaston upon Ireland or of Ireland upon Glaston. Such a book as “ Ireland and the Celtic Church ” by Professor Stokes hardly mentions Glaston at all. Yet, obviously, there must have been frequent communication between the Severn and Ireland. From St. Michael’s Hill at Bristol to St. Michael’s Hill above the'Liffey at Dublin sailors must have passed from time immemorial. Here was the merchant’s, the pilgrim’s, and missionary’s route whether from or to Ireland ; from or to the Continent.

Even in modern times, and within the memory of living men, Irish labourers, engaged only on hop-picking in Kent used to come from Dublin or Waterford to the mouth of the Parret and find their way over the Poldens, past Glaston, to the eastern Counties. Professor Bury in his life of St. Patrick thinks that, amongst the places suggested for his birth and up-bringing, Gywr or Gower on the Severn shore was the most likely. At Glaston itself, the Island of Becaria or Beccary, where stood St. Bridget’s Church or Chapel, was called “ Parva Hibernia ” from the number of pilgrims that resorted thither. At Glaston itself, on November 9th, was the festivity of St. Benignus or Benin, the disciple of St. Patrick and, for some time, the Archbishop of Armagh. He was supposed to have lived an anchorite’s life at Ferramere, close to Glaston, where he died. In 1091 his relics were translated to the Abbey of Glaston. The history of the old Monastery is full of references to St. Patrick, which, whether we interpret them as completely trustworthy or not, point, anyhow, to the existence of ancient reports. Indeed, in a.d. 439 St. Patrick is said to have visited Glaston and to have repaired the Church of St. Michael on the Tor itself. Further, St. Patrick the younger, the nephew of the great Irish Saint, is said to have been buried in the old church. ' If St. Patrick was born near Severn waters it is reasonable to conclude that he may have received his Latin education in the “ classes ” or “ collegia ” of Monmouth or Glamorgan. There was no place in Ireland at that time where he could have gained the requisite knowledge for travel and missionary teaching. There was no place in the bounds of Hibernia like Caerleon or Caerwent. No doubt the question of the birth place and up-bringing of St. Patrick is a thorny one and old biographers and annalists have contrived to weave in miracles with facts, but have critical biographers paid sufficient attention to Professor Bury’s theory ?

St. Finnian (d. 550) called “ tutor of the Saints of Ireland,” founder of Clonard at the head waters of the river Boyne, studied for thirty years under St. David and also St. Gildas in South Wales. This is a proof in itself that the torch of learning was kept burning in this region more than any other and South Wales was always in very close communication with Glaston. Gildas led a hermit’s life on the Island of Steep Holm, as an anchorite, just opposite the mouth of the Parret, the waterway to Glaston. St. Patrick according to his own well-known “ Confession or Epistle to the Irish ” was not a native of Ireland. He says “ my father Calpurnius was formerly a decurio, the son of Potitus, a priest who lived in the village of Banavan, be longing to Tabernia; for he had a cottage in the neighbourhood when I was captured.” He was taken by his captors, probably Orcadian pirates to the north of Ireland. Some have located St. Patrick’s birthplace at Dumbarton, but, not to touch a great controversy, it may be sufficient to point out that the more completely Romanised tradition of Glamorgan and South Wales seem more applicable to the case than the Clyde. The word “ Decurio ” looks like a legacy from Roman military occupation at Caerleon, which would not apply to Dumbarton. A St. Decumanus who crossed the Severn Sea from South Wales and left his name to the present Parish of St. Decumans in North Somerset may suggest the same association. The place name Banavan seems like a compound of Avon and there was an Avon in the ancient land of Morganwg flowing into the Severn Sea opposite Gwyr or Gower. Here, too, were the placenames Aberafan and Talafan as well as a district called Afan.1 “ Banavan ” might therefore mean head of the Avon river as Bincombe and Buncombe on the Quantock hills mean head (Ben) of the combe, just as it does in the Bens of Connemara. “ Tabernia ” reminds us of “ The Three Taverns ” on the Appian way from Puteoli (Acts xxviii, 15). St. Patrick (or Patricius) with a father called Calpurnius and a grandfather Potitus might surely be a Romanised Briton of Glamorgan.

The change of language to which he alludes in his “ Confession,” from the vernacular to Latin would be illustrated nowhere more forcibly than in the “ classes ” and “ collegia ” of South Wales. When Saint Patrick returned from his captivity under Milcho and escaped to a ship that helped him homewards to South Wales he must have learned much more and made himself proficient in Latin, the “ lingua franca ” of the old world. With regard to his first capture by Orcadian pirates if it was made in Severn waters this is not to be wondered at as Gildas tells us what an avenue for traffic these waters were—and, therefore, an attractive field for piracy. Whatever may be said in favour of the theory that Saint Patrick was born in South Wales and near Severn watersis strengthened by the persistent traditions of Glaston which claim the Saint as a resident and as a restorer of its Church and as a contributor to the fame of the great Abbey. The very proximity of the place and the unique character of its foundation should have led St. Patrick thither. Although we must not attach too much importance to relics the “ ossa Patricii ” lay in its sacred tumulus, so John of Glaston wrote. ' It may be noted that the Latin word “ Decurio,” applied to St. Patrick’s father, occurs on a Roman inscription found at Malpas in Cheshire (1812) in which the Emperor Trajan confers the Roman citizenship upon a certain soldier called Reburrus,1 who is “ Decurion ” of the first “ala” or wing of the Pannonians. The date is a.d. 103. We may never identify the real “ Patricius ” but might not his father, Calpurnius, have been a “ decurio ” of the Second Legion at or near Caerleon ? The Roman forces were not withdrawn in his day and the date of St. Patrick’s birth is said to have been 373. The saint’s life is crowded with legend but when in his Confession he says he baptized one blessed Scottish virgin, Bridget, of noble race most fair, “ this was one of the acts that made him really “ Apostolus Scotorum.” One thing seems certain that he never received his commission from Rome. Not a word is said about this in his Confession, a trustworthy autobiography. His first labours were in Ulster. Poetry and tradition have made the “ Pats ” and “ Biddies ” of Dublin very different people from their prototypes. It must be noted that the old inhabitants of Ireland were called Scoti.

In King Alfred’s time three Scoticame to his court from Ireland on pilgrimage. The name of one of them was Macbeth. If the Steep Holm is considered to be an Island within the bounds of Somerset and in the Parish of Brean (as, indeed, it has for centuries), then St. Gildas may be claimed as a former resident in the County (516-570 ?); and, further, if St. Cadoc who, according to more than one account was also called St. Cungar, founding a monastery at Congresbury, it will be permissible to claim him, also, as a former resident. There can be no doubt about the antiquity of Congresbury and, with it, Banwell. King Alfred (872-901) gave both monasteries to Bishop Asset. They certainly appear as Celtic in their origin. To this day the inhabitants of Wick St. Lawrencespeak of an exceptionally high tide as “ David’s Flood.”The very geographical features of the Channel favours quick and easy passages between the two coasts of North Somerset and South Wales. The landing-places are in sight of one another and the tidal wave or “ Bore ” was of great assistance always in helping the primitive boats up and down the narrow creeks and estuaries according to its ebb and flow. Nature had provided an ideal meeting-place for the work of these Celtic sailor Saints. Brent Knoll was a towering observation point visible far down the Channel and Brent was said to have been given to Glaston by Rex Arturus himself. However that may be this region must always be associated with the three great Fathers of the Celtic Church—Gildas, Cadoc and David—and we ought to add Patrick. Ireland owed much to Wales for the first and original sources of Christian truth and Christian inspiration,—far more than Wales to Ireland. Mr. J. W. Willis Bund in his “ Celtic Church in Wales ” pointed out how South Wales, (and he might have added North Somerset), provided for the centre and south of Ireland by the school and monastery of Clonmard whilst North Wales provided for Ulster and the north of Ireland by the school of the Irish Bangor. By the light of this hypothesis the two islands of the Steepand Flat Holm acquire a great significance. Historically they are greater than the Islands of Arran or Macdara’s Island or indeed any island off the Irish coast. The “ Principium ” or beginning came from Severn waters. If the monks of Glaston first set up a light-house on the Steep Holm as Louis Nedelec affirms in his “ Cambria Sacra ” there is more in this useful work than appears at first. Indeed, the eye of the historian wanders continually from Glaston Tor to the Steep Holm and again from the Steep Holm to Glaston, both under the mighty tutelage of St. Michael. Those tall cliffs of the Steep Holm, standing four-square to the winds of heaven figure as a kind of great “Rook of Ages” where Scripture truths were preserved and handed on and where that miraoulous

See “ George of Ravenna,” p. 424. Urbs ab Uxellae ostio longe
separata. Fluvius est Axe—Uxella forte est Axbridge : also “ History of
the Ancient Britons," by J. A. Giles, D.C.L., vol. ii, p. 102.
Vol. ii, pp. 270-2.
Dumnonia and Glaston
29Elton's Origins of English History," p. 141.
Lewis' “ Topographical Dictionary," vol. i, p. 509.Ashmolean Rolls, Bodleian.
“ The Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain,” by J. Collier, p. 24.
“ Adam of Domerham,” vol. ii, p. 667.
4- Epistle to Marcella.
Dumnonia and Glaston
31

See Itinerary of Giraldus Camerenais, chap. v.
 "Celtic Britain/’ p. 79.

1 Wells MSS. Hist. Commission, vol. ii, pp. 245 and 250.
Dumnonia and Glaston
35

Godwin de Praesulibus.

See Warrington's “ History of Wales ”•—Map also Itinerary of
Giraldos Cambrensis, edited by David Powell—Map. 1804.
42

“ The Celt, Roman and Saxon,” by Thomas Wright, p. 369.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 891.
3. See "Usher’s Antiquities,” p. 623, and “ A Memorial of British Piety.”
Dumnonia and Glaston
43

See " The Nineteenth Century and After," April, 1919, describing the
life of St. Patrick.
Dumnonia and Glaston
45

See Braikenbridge MSS., Taunton Museum.
46
Dumnonia

“ Monumental History of the British Church," by Homilly Alien.
Dumnonia and Glaston
47

Exon Domesday
Vol i, p. 272.
Vol. i, p. 205.

1911.
Proceedings Som. Arch. & N.H. Soc., vol. Ivii, pt. ii, p. 114.
“ Ireland under the Normans," by G. H. Orpen. Clarendon Press,
“ St. Dogmael't Abbey," by E. Pritchard.
Skene, vol. ii, p. 480.
RUINS OF THE GREAT CHU RCH—LOOKING
WEST.
Dumnonia and Glaston
51

“ The Church under the Commonwealth,” by W. A. Shaw, vol. ii.

The only Welsh goldmine outside

of the mines of the Dolgellau gold-belt . The workings are of Roman  or earlier origin , and of considerable significance, their standing being comparable with those in Romania, and the late Iron Age gold sites of Limousin', in central France. It has been suggested, that these very early workings exploited an oxidized zone, with the gold being, removed from gossanous clays by washing, and sluicing.

A series of pre-19th Century pits and open works, some with workings driven below them, run for over a kilometre, North East, South West, along a mountain spur forming the South East side of the Cothi Valley. More modern workings have extended earlier workings; in the mid 1930s the sinking of New Shaft was resumed to a depth of 480 feet, with levels driven at 100, 160, 260, 360 and 460 feet to work the mineralisation under the Ogofau Pit. There is no dominant vein or lode, gold mineralisation occurring within a network of thin discontinuous veins with occasional lenses of gold bearing quartz.

Little is known about the pre 19th Century working, with available literature prior to 1846 showing an unawareness of gold being mined here. Gold was rediscovered in 1848 by Sir Warington Smyth of the Geological Survey, and later by Sir Henry de la Beche, who made the first gold assay of quartz from the mine. Gold was worked in a short-lived operation in 1853, and small-scale mining resumed in 1871 until 1897.

Working resumed in 1905-06, with 381 tons of ore yielding 44 ounces of gold and 6.6 ounces of silver , for a profit of £172. Later in 1906 the Ogofau Mining Company processed 360 tons of ore yielding 28 ounces of gold and 5 ounces of silver (for a profit of £105). In 1908, 75 tons of ore yielded 11 ounces of gold, but development costs led to the lease passing to the Cothi Mines Ltd in 1909, who in that year recorded 23 ounces of gold from 96 tones of ore. Cothi Mines failed in 1912.

The main period of working began in 1933 with the formation of Roman Deep Ltd. At least some gold was produced about this time as gold from Roman Deep together with the Dolgellau mines, Prince Edward Mine and Marina Mine provided gold for Princess Marina's wedding ring in 1935 (gold from the bar produced was also used for other royal rings). By 1936, development was well advanced but the ore, auriferous sulphide concentrates, was difficult to treat and had to be sent abroad for smelting. Ore was initially sent to Hamburg, almost 300 tons of ore yielding 260 ounces of gold. Milling began in January 1938, with 16,862 tons of ore, mostly stockpiled, producing gold worth £11,106 (representing 1388 ounces at the then gold price of £8 per ounce). About this time the political situation in Europe made it impossible to continue to ship the ore to Germany and it was then sent to Seattle in America for treatment. By November 1938 funds were exhausted and milling ceased. Pumping was stopped the following year and the company was wound up in 1943. The mine site is now a scheduled national monument run by the National Trust. It includes a visitors centre, a collection of 1930s mining machinery (from Olwyn Goch Mine near Halkyn in north Wales), and has guided tours of some of the Roman and the more recent underground workings. Drilling undertaken by students at Cardiff University and alluvial gold occurrences in streams to the NE has shown that the mineralization continues beyond the immediate mine area Brown, 1993).
Visible gold is rare at Dolaucothi, although a few specimens are held in the National Museum of Wales Collection in Cardiff. More typically, the gold occurs as minute inclusions in pyrite or arsenopyrite.

nia aurum et argentum, et alia metalla pretium victoriae

These metals have, in later times, been got in qualities sufficient to prove, that they might, at an earlier period, have been an object worthy of conquest. In the reigns of James IV and James V vast wealth was procured in the Lead Hills, from the gold collected from the sand washed from the mountain. In the reign of the latter, not less than to the value of three hundred thousand pounds sterling. In another place, a piece of thirty ounces weight was found. Much also was obtained in the time of the Regent Morton7,. The search is now given over; but bits are still found accidentally. Lord Hopton, owner of the Lead, Hills, is in possession of a specimen that weighs an ounce and a half. Gold is to this day found in Cornwall, with tin and other substances*. The largest piece that has been yet discovered, is equal in weight to three guineas. It is probable that it was the Cornish gold which proved the lure to the Romans; for it was impossible they or the Phoenecians  could be ignorant of it, who had such long commerce with the country, and who were acquainted with the manner of obtaining it in other places. Pliny, speaking of tin, says, that there is found in the gold mines of Spain and Portugal, a sort called Elutiah (which a Cornish man would call stream tin), being washed from the vein by water, and gathered up in baskets along with the gold. Strabo and Tacitus agree, that we had mines silver. of silver. In the reigns of Edward first and third. there were very considerable works at Combmar-tin in Devonshire: three hundred and thirty-seven miners sent for out of Derbyshire, were employed in them; and the produce was so great as to assist Edward the Third to carry on the war with France. In the beginning of this century, much native silver was found on the estate of Sir John Ershine, in the county of Stirling; but the vein was soon exhausted.

The Britons were acquainted with the uses of gold and the art of coining before the arrival of the Romans; witness the golden sickles of the Druids, the coins found at Carnbre in Cornwall, Alluvial. 

 To prevent antiquaries being further misled about the Ampthill gold mine, I must inform them, that it proved only a body of mica aurea; or, to speak like a punster, turned out nothing but tale. A Camden, i. 47. and the coins of Cassivelaunus. They made use of different sorts of metals for the purpose of coining; but chiefly gold, as being the easiest fused, and most capable of an impression. Doctor Borlase has preserved a series of these very early coins, from the rudest and most unintelligible impressions, to the period when the Britons made an attempt to form a face on their coins. All these are unlettered; a proof of their antiquity, and of their having been struck before their intercourse with the Romans. The first we know of, which is inscribed, is that of Caissvelaunus, cotemporary with Caesar. The next is of Cunobeline, who had even been at Rome. As soon as the Britons became acquainted with the Romans, they made an essay to imitate their manner of coining; they put letters on them, elephants, and gryphons; things they were before unacquainted with. They were not suffered to make any progress in the art; for as soon as their conquest was effected, their coin was suppressed. The learned have endeavoured !

 The gold sickles do not seem to have had anything to do with coins, and they belonged to the Druids of Gaul, not Britain; and as to Cassivollaunus, his name is not known on any coin. The coins of the Britons, like those of the Gauls, wore imitations of money current among the Greeks of Marseilles, and more especially the gold stater of Philip II. of Macedon. It is remarkable that the Dumnonii and the people of the tin country had no coins of their own minting. The work to be consulted on the subject is Evans’s ‘Coins of the Ancient Britons.’ in an attempt to trace these antient monies from the Phoenicians; but the comparison would not hold. The Gauls alone had some pieces similar: nor is this to be wondered at, since they and the Britons had a common origin, were neighbours, and might as well agree in the few arts they had, as in religion and languages.

I now return to the subjects which occasioned this digression; and to give some account of the various antique instruments and coins found near Flint; and accompany the same by the more expressive description, a print.

N° 1. tab. v. is a rich ornament of gold, in form of a button with a shank. It is composed elegantly with twisted wire, and studded with little globular bits of solid gold. This seems to have belonged to the bracelet or necklace (it is uncertain which), whose fragment is represented at No 2. This is also composed of gold links, with round beads of a rich blue glass placed between every second link. Something similar to this is preserved by count Caylus, which is entire, and appears to have been a necklace'.

No.3. is a cylindric fragment of glass, probably part of some ornament, being of a rich blue color, and perforated as if it was designed to be strung. With it was found a thick piece of sea-green glass, part of a vase. Glass was among the earlier imports into Britaing, when the wild natives were as much captivated with toys as the Indians of new-discovered countries are at present. At first they received these, and all their other vitreous commodities, by means of the Phoenicians, whose capital, Tyre, was pre-eminent in that manufacture. The glain nadroedd, or snake-gems, were at first obtained by way of exchange for the British exports. They were originally made by the Britons of stone. I have such a one in my cabinet. I have seen another in possession of the Reverend Hugh Davies, found in Anglesea. The traders soon learned to imitate what was prized so highly in our island, in a more elegant material; and imported them as a most captivating article of commerce; in the same manner as circumnavigators often mimic, in shewy brass, the utensils and weapons of Indian nations, in order to engage their friendship.

N° 4. is a small brazen head, with the back part affixed to iron. Perhaps this was one of the Sigillaria, or little images sold at the fairs, and presented usually to children: the fairs where these toys were sold went by the same name. A learned friend also supposes these to be miniature likenesses, which friends presented to each other as memorials.

N° 5. is a Stylus, or instrument for writing on the ceratae tabellae, or waxen tablets; which were made of thin leaves of lead, brass, or ivory, and covered with a thin coat of wax. The pen, if I may call it so, was usually of brass; one end pointed, in order to write; the other flat, in order to efface what was wrong, by smoothing or closing the wax. Horace gives every writer most excellent advice, in alluding to this practice:

Saepe Stylurn vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint,

Scripturus.

Oft turn your style, when you intend to write Things worthy to be read.

N° 6. is an instrument of very singular use: a narrow species of spoon, destined to collect, at funerals, the tears of the relations of the deceased, in order to deposit them in the little phials which were placed with the ashes in the urn, memorials of their grief. Such are very frequently found: but the custom is far higher than that of classical antiquity,; for the Psalmist, in expressing his sorrows, alludes to it; Thou tellest my flittings ; put my tears into thy bottle.

N" 7. is an instrument seemingly designed for the purpose of dressing the wicks of lamps.

N" 8. may possibly be destined for the same uses.

(!) One of the most productive gold mines in old times may be supposed to have been Ogofau near DolauCothiin Carmarthenshire, where extensive traces of the mining are still well known; and gold mining has been carried on lately in the neighbourhood of Dolgelley.

Donaghmore High Cross, Co. Down, Northern Ireland

Moone High Cross, Co. Kildare, Southern Ireland

St Robert’s Cave-Chapel And Holy Well, Knaresborough, North Yorkshire

Saxon Cross in St Peter’s Minster Church, Leeds, West Yorkshire

Chysauster Ancient Settlement, Near Gulval, Cornwall

Gop Hill Cairn, Trelawnyd, Flintshire (Sir y Fflint), Wales

Farnhill Moor Cup-Marked Rocks, Near Skipton, North Yorkshire

The Potteries Museum And Art Gallery, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

Panorama Stones, St Margaret’s Gardens, Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Haystack Rock, Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire

St Nicholas’ Round Church, Orphir, Orkney Isles.

The Mineral Well, Near Brinkies Brae, Stromness, Orkney

Castle Haugh, Paythorne Bridge, Newsholme, Lancashire

Winckley Lowes I, Near Hurst Green, Lancashire

The Blarney Stone, Blarney Castle, Co. Cork, Southern Ireland

Dyffryn Ardudwy Burial Chamber, Gwynedd, North Wales

Pinder Hill, Waddington, Near Clitheroe, Lancashire

High Wall Well, Bramley Meade, Whalley, Lancashire

St Peter’s Church, Prestbury, Cheshire

Churchyard Calvary Cross, Great Mitton, Lancashire

In Early Irish literature a

Bríatharogam "word ogham", plural Bríatharogaim is a two word kenningwhich explains the meanings of the names of the letters of the

Ogham alphabet.

Three variant lists of bríatharogaim or 'word-oghams' have been preserved,

dating to the Old Irishperiod. They are as follows:

Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín

Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc

Bríatharogam Con Culainn

The first two of these are attested from all three surviving copies of the Ogam Tract, while the "Cú Chulainn" version is not in the Book of Ballymote and only known from 16th-and 17th-century manuscripts.

The Auraicept na n-Écesor 'Scholars' Primer' reports and interprets the Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín.

Later Medieval scholars believed that all of the letter names were those of trees, and attempted to explain the bríatharogaim in that light. However, modern scholarship has shown that only eight at most of the letter names are those of trees, and that the word-oghams or kennings themselves support this. The kennings as edited (in normalized Old Irish) and translated by McManus (1988) are as follows:

Letter Meaning Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc Bríatharogam Con Culainn

ᚁ B Beithe'Birch' féochos foltchain "withered foot with fine hair" glaisem cnis "greyest of skin" maise malach "beauty of the eyebrow"

ᚂ L Luis'Flame' or 'Herb' lí súla "lustre of the eye" carae cethrae "friend of cattle" lúth cethrae "sustenance of cattle"

ᚃ F Fern'Alder' airenach fían "vanguard of warriors" comét lachta "milk container" dín cridi "protection of the heart"

ᚄ S Sail'Willow' lí ambi pallor of a lifeless one" lúth bech "sustenance of bees" tosach mela "beginning of honey"

ᚅ N Nin'Branch-fork' costud síde "establishing of peace" bág ban "boast of women" bág maise "boast of beauty"

ᚆ H Úath'Fear' condál cúan "assembly of packs of hounds" bánad gnúise "blanching of faces" ansam aidche "most difficult at night"

ᚇ D Dair'Oak' ardam dosae "highest tree" grés soír "handicraft of a craftsman" slechtam soíre "most carved of craftsmanship"

ᚈ T  Tinne 'Iron Bar' trian roith "one of three parts of a wheel "smiur gúaile" marrow of (char)coal"  trian n-airm" one of three parts of a weapon"

ᚉ C Coll'Hazel' caíniu fedaib "fairest tree" carae blóesc "friend of nutshells" milsem fedo "sweetest tree"

ᚊ Q Cert'Bush' or 'Rag' clithar baiscill "shelter of a [lunatic?]" bríg anduini "substance of an insignificant person" dígu fethail "dregs of clothing"

ᚋ M Muin'Neck', 'Ruse/Trick' or 'Love;' How about 'breath?' tressam fedmae "strongest in exertion" árusc n-airlig "proverb of slaughter" conar gotha
"path of the voice"

ᚌ G

Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote an interesting account of the sacred rites of the Druids, involving mistletoe and white bulls.

They the Druids call the mistletoe by a name meaning the all-healing.

Having made preparation for sacrifice and a banquet beneath the trees, they bring thither two white bulls, whose horns are bound then for the first time.

Clad in a white robe, the priest ascends the tree and cuts the mistletoe with a golden sickle, and it is received by others in a white cloak. They then kill the victims, praying the God will render this gift of his propitious to those to whom he has granted it. They believe that the mistletoe, taken in drink, imparts fertility to barren animals, and that it is an antidote for all poisons. Such are the religious feelings that are entertained towards trifling things by so many people.

The Order of Druids was highly respected by the native British population in Kent. Caesar wrote

The Druids are concerned with the worship of the gods, look after the public and private sacrifice, and expound religious matters; a large number of men flock to them for training, and hold them in high honour.

The Druids may have continued to hold some kind of power over the native population until well into Roman times, even when Christianity was adopted as the state religion.

". . . a bull feast was made. A white bull killed, . .

"The High King of Ireland

OGHAM INSCRIPTION.

Fardel Manor Transcribed ogham inscriptions, which lack a letter for p , show Primitive Irish to be similar in morphology and inflections to Gaulish, Latin, Classical Greek and Sanskrit. Many of the characteristics of modern and medieval Irish,

SVAQQUCI Ancient Inscription In the mid-nineteenth century a large stone, which had been used as part of a footbridge over a stream at Fardel , was recognised as bearing an Ogham inscription. The inscription, in Goidelic (Primitive Irish), reads "SVAQQUCI MAQI QICI", meaning The stone of Safaqqucus , son of Qicus.In 1861 the stone was presented to the British Museum, where it remains.

OGHAM INSCRIPTION.

Fardel Manor Transcribed ogham inscriptions, which lack a letter for p , show Primitive Irish to be similar in morphology and inflections to Gaulish, Latin, Classical Greek and Sanskrit. Many of the characteristics of modern (and medieval) Irish, such as initial mutations, distinct "broad" and "slender" consonants and consonant clusters, are not yet apparent. More than 300 ogham inscriptions are known in Ireland, including 121 in County Kerry and 81 in County Cork, and more than 75 found outside Ireland in western Britain and the Isle of Man, including more than 40 in Wales, where Irish colonists settled in the 3rd century, and about 30 in Scotland, although some of these are in Pictish. Many of the British inscriptions are bilingual in Irish and Latin, but none show any sign of the influence of Christianity or Christian epigraphic tradition, suggesting they date before 391, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire; only about a dozen of the Irish inscriptions show any such sign. The majority of ogham inscriptions are memorials, consisting of the name of the deceased in the genitive case, followed by maqi, maqqi, "of the son" (Modern Irish mic), and the name of his father, or avi, avvi, "of the grandson", (Modern Irish uí) and the name of his grandfather: for example dalagni maqi dali, "[the stone] of Dalagnos son of Dalos". Sometimes the phrase maqqi mucoi, "of the son of the tribe", is used to show tribal affiliation. Some inscriptions appear to be border markers. Old Irish, written from the 6th century on, has most of the distinctive characteristics of Irish, including "broad" and "slender" consonants, initial mutations, loss of inflectional endings, and consonant clusters created by the loss of unstressed syllables, along with a number of significant vowel and consonant changes including the presence of the letter p. As an example, a 5th-century king of Leinster, whose name is recorded in Old Irish king-lists and annals as MacCaírthinn, Uí Enechglaiss, is memorialised on an ogham stone near where he died. This gives the late Primitive Irish version of his name (in the genitive case), as maqi cairatini avi inequaglas. Similarly, the Corcu Duibne, a people of County Kerry known from Old Irish sources, are memorialised on a number of stones in their territory as dovinias. Old Irish filed, "poet (gen.)", appears in ogham as velitas. In each case the development of Primitive to Old Irish shows the loss of unstressed syllables and certain consonant changes. These changes, traced by historical linguistics, are not unusual in the development of languages but appear to have taken place unusually quickly in Irish. According to one theory given by John T. Koch, these changes coincide with the conversion to Christianity and the introduction of Latin learning. All languages have various registers or levels of formality, the most formal of which, usually that of learning and religion, changes slowly while the most informal registers change much more quickly, but in most cases are prevented from developing into mutually unintelligible dialects by the existence of the more formal register. Koch argues that in pre-Christian Ireland the most formal register of the language would have been that used by the learned and religious class, the druids, for their ceremonies and teaching. After the conversion to Christianity the druids lost their influence, and formal Primitive Irish was replaced by the then Upper Class Irish of the nobility and Latin, the language of the new learned class, the Christian monks. The vernacular forms of Irish, i.e. the ordinary Irish spoken by the upper classes (formerly 'hidden' by the conservative influence of the formal register) came to the surface, giving the impression of having changed rapidly; a new written standard, Old Irish, established itself.

Ancient Inscription
In the mid-nineteenth century a large stone, which had been used as part of a footbridge over a stream at Fardel, was recognised as bearing an Ogham inscription. The inscription, in Goidelic (Primitive Irish), reads " SVAQQUCI MAQI QICI " , meaning  " The stone of Safaqqucus , son of Qicus" or read below grandson. In 1861 the stone was presented to the British Museum, where it remains, It is listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Ferdendelle, the 67th of the 79 Devonshire holdings of Robert, Count of Mortain, half-brother of King William the Conqueror and one of that king's Devon Domesday Book tenants-in-chief. Ferdendelle possibly signifies "fourth part", that is a quarter of some larger estate. The Count's tenant was Reginald I de Vautort (died about 1123), of Trematon Castle in Cornwall, the first feudal baron of Trematon, who held 57 manors from the Count. The Anglo-Saxon tenant before the Norman Conquest of 1066 was a certain Dunn, as recorded in the Domesday Book. Ferthedel is the form in which it is later listed in the Book of Fees (circa 1302), held from the feudal barony of Trematon.
FitzJoell
It subsequently descended to the FitzJoell family. In 1245 it was the dwelling of  Waren FitzJoell, the last in the male line, who left a daughter and heiress Ellen FitzJoell, who married William Newton, to whose descendants the manor passed.
Newton. William Newton, having inherited Fardel on his marriage to the heiress Ellen FitzJoell, lived at Fardel during the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307), but died without male issue, leaving a daughter and sole heiress Jone Newton, who in 1303 married Sir John Raleigh of Smalerigge in the parish of Axminster, Devon, whose descendants made Fardel their seat. Raleigh. Sir John Raleigh, who married the heiress Jone Newton, was the son and heir of Sir Hugh Raleigh of Smalerigge. This branch of the Raleigh family was more anciently seated at Nettlecombe Raleigh in Somerset, but was probably originally a junior branch of the de Raleigh family, lords of the manor of Raleigh in the parish of Pilton in North Devon.[19]
Later members of the family resident there included Members of Parliament Adam Ralegh {c.1480–1545 or later, and Carew Raleigh (ca. 1550 – ca. 1625). Hele, Carew Raleigh (c.1550-c.1625) sold the manor of Fardel to Walter Hele, father of Elize Hele (1560–1635) of Parke in the parish of Bovey Tracey, Devon, a lawyer and philanthropist (whose monument with recumbent effigy survives in Bovey Tracey Church), in whose family it remained until 1740.
Later owners
After 1740 there were several owners, one of whom was Sir Robert Palk (1717–1798) of Haldon House in the parish of Kenn, in Devon. In 1850 it was in use as a farmhouse, occupied by Arthur Trowbridge Horton.
Fardel Stone
In the mid-nineteenth century a large stone, which had been used as part of a footbridge over a stream at Fardel, was recognised as bearing an Ogham inscription. The inscription, in Goidelic (Primitive Irish), reads "SVAQQUCI MAQI QICI", meaning "[The stone] of Safaqqucus, son of Qicus". In 1861 the stone was presented to the British Museum, where it remains.
. Similarly, the Corcu Duibne, a people of County Kerry known from Old Irish sources, are memorialised on a number of stones in their territory as dovinias.[5] Old Irish filed, "poet (gen.)", appears in ogham as velitas. In each case the development of Primitive to Old Irish shows the loss of unstressed syllables and certain consonant changes.

which lack a letter for /p/, show Primitive Irish to be similar in morphology and inflections to Gaulish, Latin, Classical Greek and Sanskrit. Many of the characteristics of modern (and medieval) Irish, such as initial mutations, distinct "broad" and "slender" consonants and consonant clusters, are not yet apparent.
More than 300 ogham inscriptions are known in Ireland, including 121 in County Kerry and 81 in County Cork, and more than 75 found outside Ireland in western Britain and the Isle of Man, including more than 40 in Wales, where Irish colonists settled in the 3rd century, and about 30 in Scotland, although some of these are in Pictish. Many of the British inscriptions are bilingual in Irish and Latin, but none show any sign of the influence of Christianity or Christian epigraphic tradition, suggesting they date before 391, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire; only about a dozen of the Irish inscriptions show any such sign.
The majority of ogham inscriptions are memorials, consisting of the name of the deceased in the genitive case, followed by maqi, maqqi, "of the son" (Modern Irish mic), and the name of his father, or avi, avvi, "of the grandson", (Modern Irish uí) and the name of his grandfather:

for example dalagni maqi dali, "[the stone] of Dalagnos son of Dalos".Sometimes the phrase maqqi mucoi, "of the son of the tribe", is used to show tribal affiliation.Old Irish, written from the 6th century on, has most of the distinctive characteristics of Irish, including "broad" and "slender" consonants, initial mutations, loss of inflectional endings, and consonant clusters created by the loss of unstressed syllables, along with a number of significant vowel and consonant changes including the presence of the letter p.

accept Druids’ power over other iron age people and Roman writers may not have told the truth about them.

Did they fight all the time? Iron Age people did fight. Their warriors had iron swords and shields. However, they may not have fought very often and probably spent most of the time peacefully being farmers. If not, they could attack other tribes and capture people from them and make them into their slaves. We do not know if the Dumnonii did this. Some tribes had chariots and horses which archaeologists have found. None have been found in Devon or Exeter, except, perhaps, a tiny fragment called a linch-pin that was found very recently at Loddiswell. Iron age linch- pin replica. Linch-pins were made of iron and were used to secure the wheels of chariots or carts. The wheels were placed on the vehicle’s axle against an axle-block, followed by a washer or ring. The pin shaft would then have been inserted through the axle, keeping the wheel in place much like a modern split pin would today. The linch-pin is an important find as it is the only example known so far in Devon of a piece of equipment which could almost certainly been part of a prehistoric chariot or cart. Iron Age people did build defences against their enemies. They dug ditches and built ramparts around the tops of hills. We call them hillforts. They made your tribe look very powerful. When other tribes looked like attacking your tribe, you went into the hill fort and threw spears, arrows and slingshot (small stones) down on them from above. Iron Age people must have been very well organised to have built them. They take a lot of work to make. At first they built more smaller ones which were just for defence or possibly for keeping cattle in. Then they built fewer larger ones and started to live in them. Hembury is a large hillfort near Honiton. Smaller hillforts are at Milber Down , near Newton Abbot and Clovelly Dykes in North Devon. Special artefacts Some iron age artefacts are beautiful and made from very expensive materials. But they would not be any good for everyday use because they would break. For example, some iron age shields are made of shiny bronze and decorated with enamel and glass beads. These may have been for impressive ceremonies rather than for fighting with.
Iron Age people were very clever at making and designing things. Sometimes they copied ideas from other tribes they met , but they also made their own designs. We think some of the richer people fastened their clothes with
brooches which were like beautiful safety pins and wore solid gold necklaces called torcs. We think that the gold may sometimes have been melted down from gold coins from the Roman Empire, as not much gold was found in Britain at
the time. Some had bead necklaces. Some of them had luxury items like bronze mirrors. One has been found at Holcombe near Lyme Regis. It has a little cat’s face on the handle and may have been hung on a round house wall because it has a loop on the end of its handle. bronze mirror Some of them made human figures out of wood**. There is one in the museum that was found at Kingsteignton. We do not know what he is for. He may be a god to worship or he may be a toy.
wooden figure Making money or swapping things People trade things when they have something that someone else wants and someone else has something they want. It’s like swapping things. Most Iron Age tribes had their own land for animals, trees for fuel and building materials and water for drinking. Some had metal in the ground they controlled and could make tools and other artefacts from it. Some lived near the sea and could take salt from the water. Some had fought other tribes and taken some of them to be slaves. They could trade slaves, metal and salt for things they did not have. The Dumnonii may have used iron bars as valuable objects to trade. Julius Caesar called them currency bars**. One of the best hoards of currency bars was found in Devon. The iron bars could have been raw materials for tools or weapons, or perhaps they were offerings to their gods. They may have been for trading iron to places where they did not have any. We do not know.
Some tribes had coins. The Dumnonii did not – we think they used coins that their neighbours the Durotriges used. These coins have blobby shapes on them but no writing. We think this is because the Durotriges did not read or write. The coins were copied from other coins which had proper pictures of chariots and horses. The copies were not exactly the same and as they became copied in turn, the pictures kept getting less and less like chariots and horses and more like blobs.
Durotrigian coins

In Early Irish literature a Bríatharogam "word ogham", plural Bríatharogaim is a two wordkenningwhich explains the meanings of the names of the letters of the Ogham alphabet. Three variant lists of bríatharogaim or 'word-oghams' have been preserved, dating to the Old Irish period. They are as follows: Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc Bríatharogam Con Culainn The first two of these are attested from all three surviving copies of theOgam Tract, while the "Cú Chulainn" version is not in the Book of Ballymote and only known from 16th-and 17th-century manuscripts.

TheAuraicept na n-Écesor 'Scholars' Primer' reports and interprets the Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín. Later Medieval scholars believed that all of the letter names were those of trees, and attempted to explain the bríatharogaim in that light. However, modern scholarship has shown that only eight at most of the letter names are those of trees, and that the word-oghams or kennings themselves support this. The kennings as edited (in normalized Old Irish) and translated by McManus (1988) are as follows: Letter Meaning Bríatharogam Morainn mac Moín Bríatharogam Maic ind Óc Bríatharogam Con Culainn ᚁB Beithe 'Birch' féochos foltchain "withered foot with fine hair" glaisem cnis "greyest of skin" maise malach "beauty of the eyebrow"ᚂLLuis'Flame' or 'Herb' lí súla "lustre of the eye" carae cethrae "friend of cattle" lúth cethrae "sustenance of cattle"

ᚃF Fern'Alder' airenach fían "vanguard of warriors" comét lachta "milk container" dín cridi "protection of the heart"

ᚄSSail'Willow' lí ambi pallor of a lifeless one" lúth bech "sustenance of bees" tosach mela "beginning of honey"

ᚅNNin'Branch-fork' costud síde "establishing of peace" bág ban "boast of women" bág maise "boast of beauty"

ᚆHÚath'Fear' condál cúan "assembly of packs of hounds" bánad gnúise "blanching of faces" ansam aidche "most difficult at night"

ᚇDDair'Oak' ardam dosae "highest tree" grés soír "handicraft of a craftsman" slechtam soíre "most carved of craftsmanship"

ᚈ TTinne'Iron Bar' trian roith"one of three parts of a wheel" smiur gúaile"marrow of (char)coal" trian n-airm"one of three parts of a weapon"

ᚉ CColl'Hazel' caíniu fedaib "fairest tree" carae blóesc "friend of nutshells" milsem fedo "sweetest tree"

ᚊQCert'Bush' or 'Rag' clithar baiscill
"shelter of a [lunatic?]" bríg anduini
"substance of an insignificant person" dígu fethail
"dregs of clothing"

ᚋ MMuin'Neck', 'Ruse/Trick' or 'Love;' How about 'breath?' tressam fedmae "strongest in exertion" árusc n-airlig "proverb of slaughter" conar gotha
"path of the voice"

Ogham ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜

Ogham is an alphabet that appears on monumental inscriptions dating from the 4th to the 6th century AD, and in manuscripts dating from the 6th to the 9th century. It was used mainly to write Primitive and Old Irish, and also to write Old Welsh, Pictish and Latin. It was inscribed on stone monuments throughout Ireland, particuarly Kerry, Cork and Waterford, and in England, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Wales, particularly in Pembrokeshire in south Wales.

The name Ogham is pronounced [ˈoːm] or [ˈoːəm] in Modern Irish, and it was speltogam and pronounced [ˈɔɣam] in Old Irish. Its origins are uncertain: it might be named after the Irish god Ogma, or after the Irish phraseog-úaim(point-seam), which refers to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon. Ogham is also known as orogham craobh(tree ogham)beth luis fearnorbeth luis nion, after the first few letters.

Ogham probably pre-dates the earliest inscriptions -some scholars believe it dates back to the 1st century AD -as the language used shows pre-4th century elements. It is thought to have been modelled on or inspired by the Roman, Greek or Runic scripts. It was designed to write Primitive Irish and was possibly intended as a secret form of communication.

While all surviving Ogham inscriptions are on stone, it was probably more commonly inscribed on sticks, stakes and trees. Inscriptions are mostly people's names and were probably used to mark ownership, territories and graves. Some inscriptions in primitive Irish and Pictish have not been deciphered, there are also a number of bilingual inscriptions in Ogham and Latin, and Ogham and Old Norse written with the Runic alphabet.

Notable features

Type of writing system: alphabet

Number of letters: 25, which are grouped into five aicmí (sing. aicme= group, class). Each aicme is named after its first letter. Originally Ogham consisted of 20 letters or four aicmí; the fifth acime, or Forfeda, was added for use in manuscripts.

Writing surfaces: rocks, wood, manuscripts

Direction of writing: inscribed around the edges of rocks running from bottom to top and left to right, or left to right and horizontally in manuscripts.

Letters are linked together by a solid line.

Used to write: Primitive and Old Irish, Pictish, Old Welsh and Latin

The Ogham alphabet (vertical)

The pronunciation of the letters shown is for Primitive Irish the language used in the majority of Ogham inscriptions. The names and sounds represented by of the letters uath and straifare uncertain. There are many different version of the letter names -the standard ones are used here [with the Primitive Irish ones, where known, in bracketts] -others can be found at: evertype.com.

The Ogham alphabet (horizontal)

Transliteration

LIE LUGNAEDON MACCI MENUEH

Translation

The stone of Lugnaedon son of Limenueh

From: Inchagoill Island, County Galway, Ireland

Ogham stone form Mount Melleray in County Waterford in Ireland.

Transliteration

Na Maqi Lugudeca Muc Cunea

Translation

The Sons of Lugudeca, Son of Cunea

Source:http://www.prehistoricwaterford.com/news/the-stones/

An Old Irish Joke in Primtive Irish (translation by David Stifter)

Transliteration

Tengwās īwerijonākā
Tut raddassodd trīs dītrebākī dīslondetun do bitū.
Tēgoddit in wāssākan do atareregiyī esyan kenutan writ dēwan.
Bāddar kina labarātun writ alaliyan qos qennan blēdaniyās.
Issit andan esset bīrt wiras dī ēbis writ alaliyan diyas blēdniyas: “mati ad tāyomas.”
Bowet samali qos qennan blēdaniyās.
“Issit mati sodesin,” esset bīrt aliyas uiras.
Bāddar andan ēran sodesū qos qennan blēdaniyās.
“Tongū wo mō brattan,” esset bīrt trissas uiras, “ma nīt lēggītar kiyunessus do mū, imbit gabiyū wāssākan oliyan dū swi.”

Old Irish (Sengoídelc) version

Tríar manach do·rat díultad dont ṡaegul.
Tíagait i fásach do aithrigi a peccad fri día.
Bátar cen labrad fri araile co cenn blíadnae.
Is and as·bert fer diib fri araile dia blíadnae, “Maith at·taam,” olse.
Amein co cenn blíadnae.
“Is maith ón,” ol in indara fer.
Bátar and íar suidiu co cenn blíadnae.
“Toingim fom aibit,” ol in tres fer, “mani·léicthe ciúnas dom co n-imgéb in fásach uile dúib.”

Modern Irish (Gaeilge) version (by Dennis King)

Triúr manach a thug diúltú don saol.
Téann siad ins an fhásach chun aithrí a dhéanamh ina gcuid peacaí roimh Dhia.
Bhí siad gan labhairt lena chéile go ceann bliana.
Ansin dúirt fear díobh le fear eile bliain amháin ina dhiaidh sin, “Táimid go maith,” ar seisean.
Mar sin go ceann bliana.
“Is maith go deimhin,” arsa an dara fear.
Bhí siad ann ina dhiaidh sin go ceann bliana.
“Dar m’aibíd,” arsa an treas fear, “mura ligeann sibh ciúnas dom fágfaidh mé an fásach uile daoibh!”

English version (by Dennis King)

Three holy men turned their back on the world.
They went into the wilderness to atone for their sins before God.
They did not speak to one another for a year.
At the end of the year, one of them spoke up and said, "We’re doing well."
Another year went by the same way.
"Yes we are," said the next man.
And so another year went by.
"I swear by my smock," said the third man, "if you two won’t be still I’m going to leave you here in the wilderness!

Texts in Latin

ᚓ E Edad Unknown érgnaid fid "discerning tree" commaín carat"exchange of friends"bráthair bethi(?) "brother of birch" (?)

ᚔ IIdad'Yew-tree' ? sinem fedo "oldest tree" caínem sen "fairest of the ancients" lúth lobair(?)" energy of an infirm person" (?) 

ᚕEA Ébad Unknown snámchaín feda "fair-swimming letter" cosc lobair "[admonishing?] of an infirm person" caínem éco "fairest fish"

Mistletoe translates gaelic irish drualus ancient english tradition fertility christianity grew in roman england @ the solstice

Use of the early medieval Irish ogham alphabet is largely divided between "monumental" epigraphy and "scholastic" use in, or influenced by, manuscript tradition, Scholastic ogham notably involves artificial expansions of the alphabet, such as the forfeda group, and many variations orcryptographic substitutions for the classic ogham alphabet. Scholastic ogham develops from about the 7th century and remains in use for notes in manuscripts until the 16th century. Manuscript tradition of ogham notably records Bríatharogam, i.e. medieval kennings of letter names. The most notable source of such kennings isIn Lebor Ogaim, preserved in a late 14th-century manuscript.

Gaelic poetry and grammar

Even after it ceased to be used as an everyday alphabet for writing, ogham continued to be used as the basis for teaching grammar and the rules and metrics of poetry in the Gaelic language.The medieval work The Scholar's Primer orAuraicept na n-Éces, laid down the basis for poetic composition in the Irish language for the trainee poet or file, and looked to ogham or more exactly the Beith-luis-nin for guidance. This was because the ogham alphabet was felt to be peculiarly suited to the needs of the Irish language.

In addition the training of the poet or file, involved the learning of one hundred and fifty varieties of ogham – fifty in each of the first three years of study.[2]It is clear that most of these are the same as the one hundred or so different ogham alphabets found in The Ogam Tract orIn Lebor Ogaim, which was included along with the Auraicept in theBook of Ballymote. Most of these alphabets are cryptic varieties of doubtful practical value, but some were word lists which could have given the poet a convenient vocabulary at his fingertips, while others indicate a link to tally or counting systems. Perhaps their main value was simply to train the mind in the use of words and concepts, as word play and 'punning' were a major part of Gaelic poetry.

So central was ogham to Gaelic learning that until modern times the Latin alphabet was taught in both Irish and Scots Gaelic using the letter names borrowed

from the Beith-luis-nin, along with the tradition that each name was that of a different tree.

The following is the list from Dinneen's Irish–English Dictionary, published in 1927

A:  Ailm (Elm);

B:  Beith (Birch);

C:  Coll (Hazel);

D:  Dair (Oak);

E:  Eadadh (Aspen);

F: Fearn (Alder);

G: Gath/Gort (Ivy);

H: hUath (Whitethorn);

I: Íodha (Yew),

L: Luis (Rowan);

M: Muin (Vine);

N: Nuin (Ash);

O: Oir (Broom);

P: Peith (Dwarf Elder);

R: Ruis (Elder);

S: Sail (Willow);

T: Teithne (Furze);

U: Ur Heather

Manuscript traditions on pragmatic use of ogham

Manuscript tradition, especially medievalIrish mythology, also gives accounts on uses of ogham not known from the archaeological record[5]Most of these involve ogham being used for short messages or inscriptions on wood. There is only one reference to ogham being inscribed on metal, which occurs in the epic story 'The Cattle Raid of Cooley' or Táin Bó Cúailnge. A stone pillar has a ring of iron with an ogham inscription on it stating that it is taboo ( geasa ) for a warrior bearing arms to approach without challenging to single combat. The great Ulster warrior Cúchulainn responds to this challenge by throwing the pillar, inscribed ring and all, into a nearby pond.

The rest of the references are to inscriptions on wood. One such is in the tale involving Cúchulainn's search for the three sons of DuilDermait. Cúchulainn sees a boat coming to land in the harbour at Dundalk. He boards it, killing all the passengers except the king of Alba (Scotland), who gives him the boat and sets a sea charm to help him in his quest. In return, Cúchulainn gives him a little spear ( sléigin ) with an ogham inscription on it and tells him to take Cúchulainn's seat in the court of the king ofUlsteratEmain Machain the meantime. The inscription seems to involve a signature unique to Cúchulainn, which will guarantee that the king ofAlbawill be believed when he says that Cúchulainn sent him (unless of course there is something unique about the spear). These examples suggest that objects were inscribed with individual 'signatures' for the purposes of identification. As well as confirming that a message came from a particular individual, being able to identify objects as a particular person's property would obviously be very useful.

A very interesting connection exists between ogham and Cornwall in two literary references which tie ogham into the Cornish legend of Tristan and Iseult. The first of these is in a lay written by Marie of France which speaks of Tristan cutting and squaring off a branch of hazel on which he writes his name to alert Iseult to his presence. The second reference is found in the version of the Tristan legend by the Englishman Thomas of Ercildoune which describes how Tristan engraved his name in strange runes on small bits of wood, putting them in a stream so that they would flow down to where Iseult could see them. While it is true that neither version directly refers to ogham there are good grounds for believing that ogham was the 'strange runes' used by Tristan. First of all, the cutting, squaring off, and writing of names on bits of wood sounds compatible with how ogham was probably used. Second, ogham fits better into the cultural milieu of the story than the runes. Iseult is from Ireland, and Tristan first meets Iseult when spending some time there, so it is quite plausible that they would use ogham for writing to each other. The story also reflects the reality of links between Ireland and Cornwall, visible today in the surviving ogham inscriptions. It is not hard from this to see how theCornishcould include a reference to the strange Irish writing in one of their stories. The story may ultimately be of Irish origin anyway, transmitted through those same links.

Some of the messages are referred to as being written in a cryptic form of ogham called Ogam fortgithe. One such reference comes in the story of Corc son of Lugaid, who arrives in Scotland after being banished from Ireland. He is befriended by Gruibne, poet to Feradach, king of Scotland; who notices a cryptic ogham inscription ( Ogam fortgithe ) on Corc's shield. He informs Corc that the inscription says that if Corc should arrive at Feradach's court by day, he is to be killed by night; if he should arrive by night, he is to be killed by morning. To protect Corc, Gruibne changes the inscription to say that if Corc should arrive by day he should be given Feradach's daughter by evening, if by night, he should have slept with her by morning.

The use of ogham to convey a cryptic message is also found in the story of the Gaelic warrior Finn McCooland his fool or clown Lomnae. Lomnae notifies Finn of his wife's infidelity by cutting an inscription on a four sided rod and handing it to Finn. The message does not directly accuse Finn's wife, but is instead a series of metaphors: ‘A wooden stake ( an alder stake in one version) in a fence of silver, hellebore among edible plants, husband of a wanton woman, a cuckold among the well taught Féni, and heather on Úalann of the Luigne’. Finn understands the message, but Lomnae pays for telling, as Finn’s wife has his head cut off. It should be noted that the wording itself is what is cryptic here, not the writing in ogham.

Much has been made of the cryptic nature of the inscriptions. Graves and Vendryes, in particular, argue that the inscriptions on wood are fundamentally different from those on stone, being secret and magical in character. McManus rightly argues that there is no evidence of such a sharp distinction, and as we have seen, there are enough examples to prove that inscriptions on wood were not necessarily for magical reasons. There are hints of ogham being written cryptically, but this is not the same as saying it was written for magical purposes.

Magical

The issue of ogham being used for magical purposes is the subject of a tedious argument among scholars over whether it was the alphabet itself that was considered magical, or whether it was simply a tool used by those who practised magic. This argument is related to the issue of whether the alphabet was invented by Christians or pagans, with it being presumed (perhaps wrongly) by both sides that magic would be a major motivation for a pagan inventor.[citation needed] What can be said with certainty is that there are clear examples in the literature of ogham being used for magical purposes. However, what can also be said is nothing to indicate that magic was ever the main reason for inventing ogham. The best known reference to magic is in the tale Tochmarc Étaínewhen the druid Dallán locates the missing woman Étaín Eochaid through inscribing ogham on four rods of yew. The inscription and his 'keys of poetry' ( eochraib écsi ) reveal to him that Étaín has been taken to the síd or mound of Brí Léith byMidir. This process seems to have involved some form of divination or cleromancy. According to Dinneen (1927) divination was practised using an ogham-inscribed wooden lamina or tablet known as a fiodh-lann and McCullough (1911, p251) mentions a reference to fidlanna being used in this way in 'Adomnán's Second Vision'. It is interesting to note that the general Irish term for the casting of lots is crann-chur, literally 'the casting of wood'; probably originating from the traditional use of sticks or pieces of wood to draw the lots. This is not enough evidence in itself of course, to say that the term originated from a connection with ogham. Another often quoted example of magical use concerns the fé or rod of aspen. The fé was kept in pagan graveyards to measure corpses and graves and was regarded with fear and dread. Everything that was regarded as hateful was written on it, apparently for the purposes of setting a curse, or else to keep evil sprits away from the dead. Other magical uses include a charm to cure a man of impotence by writing his name in ogham on an elm wand and striking him with it (Charles Graves,1879), and the mention in the Ogam Tract of the use of ogham to determine the sex of an unborn child.

As well as purely magical uses, there are references to ogham being used to send messages which have a magical aspect to them. The most famous of these is mentioned in the epic story The Táin Bó Cuailnge. This involves the Ulster hero Cúchulainn, while standing on one leg, using one hand, and having one eye closed, writing an ogham inscription on a withe which he then casts over a pillar stone. His rival Fergus mac Róich reads the inscription, which declares that none shall pass unless a similar feat be performed, Fergus excepted. Fergus gives the inscribed withe to the druids, asking them to interpret its secret meaning, but they have nothing to add to Fergus' interpretation. Fergus states that if this message is ignored, the withe on which the inscription is made will return magically to Cúchulainn, who then will kill one of the company before morning. Cúchulainn leaves much the same inscription on two occasions shortly afterwards. Again we are faced with the dispute about whether ogham itself was providing the magic, or whether it was just an unwitting tool.

Charles Graves (1879, p213) provides a good example of the different aspects of ogham combined in one. When a poet failed to receive payment for one of his compositions Irish law directed him to cut a four square wand, and write on it in ogham 'in the name of God'. On one side a cross was to be inscribed, the name of the offence on the second, the name of the offender on the third and an encomium (or praise poem) on the fourth. The wand should then be set up at the end of ten days. If the poet made a satire without doing this he was liable for a fine. This is an interesting combination of the Christian and pre-Christian. A cross is inscribed in the name of God, but the praise poem gets its power from the poet or file, whose supposed powers are certainly pre-Christian in origin.

Record and tally keeping

The few indications in the literature of ogham being used for other inscriptions than names or brief messages are rather vague, but there is evidence to point to ogham being used to keep records of names and lists of various kinds. The clearest example appears in the story where Conn the King of Ireland is visited by the spirit of the Celtic godLugh, who gives him the names of the future Kings of Ireland, from Conn himself to the end of time. The list is so long that Cesarn, Conn's poet, is unable to memorise it and writes it down in ogham on four rods of yew, each eight sided and twenty four feet long. The ogham is not involved in any way in the supernatural appearance of Lugh and is only mentioned in respect of the practical task of recording information. Ogham would have been concise enough to record genealogical lists, especially if each rod had eight sides to it as in this case. The excessive length of the rods mentioned here is because every name until the end of time has to be written down. In reality, most genealogies would have been of a much more manageable size!

The Ogam Tract orIn Lebor Ogaimin theBook of Ballymotepoints to other possible uses of ogham for record keeping. This includes lusogam ('herb ogham'), which may have been used in medicine, or biadogam ('food ogam') which may have used as part of housekeeping duties. Other varieties strongly suggest property or business transactions, for example conogam ( 'dog ogham') or dam-ogam ('ox ogham'). Unlike other lists, each letter in these forms does not stand for a separate name, but for a different aicme or group. Damogam is described thus: “Bull for group B, one bull, two, three, four, five bulls (for B,L,F,S,N); Ox for group H, one ox, two, three, four, five oxen (for H,D,T,C,Q); Bullock for group M, one bullock, two, three etc.; Steer for group A, one steer, two, etc.” This list is significant as it involves numbers as well as names, suggesting that counting is going on and indicating a role as a tally system and record of property. Another example of this is Ogam usceach ( ‘Water-ogham’) regarding various types of water source as follows: Group B: One stream for B, and so on to five for N; Group H: 1 Weir for H, 2 for D and so on; Group M: 1 River for M, 2 for G and so on; Group A1 Well for A, 2 for O and so on.” Sources of fresh water were valuable, and it would have been very helpful to keep a record of the number and type of water source on one’s lands.

A bundle of ogham rods recording such lists would not have been too cumbersome to carry from place to place in the travelling schools of the poets or filed, or kept in the various crannogs or hillforts of the chieftains. It is also likely that ogham could have had a role in recording trading transactions and legal judgements of various kinds. Perhaps the names of those involved were cited together with the nature and number of objects concerned. These records could have been kept in a similar way on rods to provide legal proof of what had occurred.

Hand signals

There is direct evidence for the existence of a system of ogham hand signals. The ogam tractIn Lebor Ogaimmentions two forms of finger spelling; cossogam ('foot-ogham') and sronogam ('nose-ogham'). Cossogam involves putting the fingers to the right or left of the shinbone for the first or second aicmi, and across it diagonally or straight for the third or fourth aicmi. One finger is used for the first letter, two for the second, and so on. Sronogam involves the same procedure with the ridge of the nose. Placing the finger

The area that was known as Gaul in Roman times includes modern France, and also Belgium, Luxembourg and western parts of Germany. The conquest of the region by the Romans began in the 2nd – 1st centuries BC, and continued with the ‘Gallic Wars’, led by Julius Caesar, between 58 BC and 51 BC. At that time the region was also under threat from other directions – notably the Suevi and Helvetii tribes (from modern day Germany and Switzerland) – and initially it was defeating these tribes that posed the greatest challenge to the Romans.

It was in 53BC in Alesia that the final great battle took place between the Gauls and the Romans. The gauls, fighting under , were defeated by Julius caesar and the Romans, and the Romans can be considered to have occupied France from that date on. The exact location of Alesia is still debated, although the most likely location is in Burgundy at Alise-Sainte-Reine near Dijon. From about 53 BC onwards the focus of the Romans in the Gallic Wars was more on suppressing a series of smaller invasions and uprisings – including 52 BC when a group of tribes led by Vercingetorix posed a significant threat to the Romans, but this threat was also defeated. (Enthusiasts of Asterix and Obelisk, the extremly popular French cartoon characters, will be familiar with this period! Rome then controlled the area for about six centuries, until the Roman empire itself collapsed, in the face of constant invasions. Romans in France built a number of fine villas and, notably, introduced vines from Italy. The heyday of the Romans in Gaul was during the first and second centuries AD, when there was little unrest and the later tribal invasions from the north and east had not yet started – it was a prosperous area, with prosperity built largely on potterey, wine and food exports. Until the Roman occupation, the predominant religion was druid based and very primitive. It was while under Roman rule that Christianity was introduced, and that Claudius I ordered the Druids suppressed At the same time, the Gaulish language spoken underwent a fundamental transformation, and by the end of Roman rule the language spoken was a Latin based precursor of modern day French. By the time the Romans left, to defend their homeland in the face of repeated invasions from the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals and others, (later as we know to prove successful), towards the end of the 5th century, the basic shape of Modern France had started to emerge. Although the Franks successfully invaded Gaul, they did little to alter the society that was by that time established. Gaul was soon established, with a King based in Paris, and the ‘modern history of France’ began. Visiting Roman monuments in France, Orange Roman theatre, Provence There are many locations in France where you can see ruins dating from the period of Roman occupation. The greatest concentration of these, and the best place to start your exploration of Roman France, is in the south of the country near the border between Languedoc and Provence – highlights include the Pont du Gard aquaduct, the amphitheatre at Orange, and the colosseums at both Nimes and Arles, all found in Claudius was born on 1 August 10 BC at the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls in what is now Lyon, France. He had two older siblings, Germanicus and Livilla. His mother, Antonia, may have had two other children who died young. His maternal grandparents were Mark Antony and Octavia Minor, Augustus' sister, and he was therefore the great-great grandnephew of Gaius Julius Caesar. His paternal grandparents were Livia, Augustus' third wife, and Tiberius Claudius Nero. During his reign, Claudius revived the rumor that his father Drusus was actually the illegitimate son of Augustus, to give the appearance that Augustus was Claudius' paternal grandfather. In 9 BC, his father Drusus unexpectedly died on campaign in Germania, possibly from illness. Claudius was then left to be raised by his mother, who never remarried. When Claudius' disability became evident, the relationship with his family turned sour. Antonia referred to him as a monster, and used him as a standard for stupidity. She seems to have passed her son off on his grandmother Livia for a number of years.[3]

Livia was a little kinder, but nevertheless often sent him short, angry letters of reproof. He was put under the care of a "former mule-driver"[4]to keep him disciplined, under the logic that his condition was due to laziness and a lack of will-power. However, by the time he reached his teenage years his symptoms apparently waned and his family took some notice of his scholarly interests. In 7 AD, Livy was hired to tutor him in history, with the assistance of Sulpicius Flavus. He spent a lot of his time with the latter and the philosopher Athenodorus. Augustus, according to a letter, was surprised at the clarity of Claudius' oratory.[5]Expectations about his future began to increase.

Public life

His work as a budding historian damaged his prospects for advancement in public life. According to Vincent Scramuzza and others, Claudius began work on a history of the Civil Wars that was either too truthful or too critical of Octavian—then reigning as Augustus Caesar. In either case, it was far too early for such an account, and may have only served to remind Augustus that Claudius was Antony's descendant. His mother and grandmother quickly put a stop to it, and this may have convinced them that Claudius was not fit for public office. He could not be trusted to toe the existing party line. When he returned to the narrative later in life, Claudius skipped over the wars of the second triumvirate altogether. But the damage was done, and his family pushed him to the background. When the Arch of Pavia was erected to honor the Imperial clan in 8 BC, Claudius' name (now Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus after his elevation to pater familias of Claudii Nerones on the adoption of his brother) was inscribed on the edge—past the deceased princes, Gaius and Lucius, and Germanicus' children. There is some speculation that the inscription was added by Claudius himself decades later, and that he originally did not appear at all. Gratus proclaims Claudius emperor. Detail from A Roman Emperor 41AD, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas, c. 1871. When Augustus died in 14 AD, Claudius — then 23 — appealed to his uncle Tiberius to allow him to begin the cursus honorum. Tiberius, the new Emperor, responded by granting Claudius consular ornaments. Claudius requested office once more and was snubbed. Since the new Emperor was no more generous than the old, Claudius gave up hope of public office and retired to a scholarly, private life. Despite the disdain of the Imperial family, it seems that from very early on the general public respected Claudius. At Augustus' death, thee quites, or knights, chose Claudius to head their delegation. When his house burned down, the Senate demanded it be rebuilt at public expense. They also requested that Claudius be allowed to debate in the Senate. Tiberius turned down both motions, but the sentiment remained. During the period immediately after the death of Tiberius' son, Drusus, Claudius was pushed by some quarters as a potential heir. This again suggests the political nature of his exclusion from public life. However, as this was also the period during which the power and terror of the commander of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus, was at its peak, Claudius chose to downplay this possibility. After the death of Tiberius the new emperor Caligula (the son of Claudius' brother Germanicus) recognized Claudius to be of some use. He appointed Claudius his co-consul in 37 in order to emphasize the memory of Caligula's deceased father Germanicus. Despite this, Caligula relentlessly tormented his uncle: playing practical jokes, charging him enormous sums of money, humiliating him before the Senate, and the like. According to Cassius Dio Claudius became very sickly and thin by the end of Caligula's reign, most likely due to stress.[8]A possible surviving portrait of Claudius from this period may support this.

Little is known of Aulus Plautius's early career. It was previously believed that he was involved in the suppression of a slave revolt in Apulia, probably in 24, alongside Marcus Aelius Celer. However, the "A·PLAVTIO" of the inscription is now associated with Aulus' father. He was suffect consul for the second half of 29, and held a provincial governorship, probably of Pannonia, in the early years of Claudius's reign: another inscription shows he oversaw the building of a road between Trieste and Rijekaat this time. Claudius appointed him to lead his invasion of Britannia in 43, in support of Verica, king of the Atrebates and an ally of Rome, who had been deposed by his eastern neighbours the Catuvellauni. The army was composed of four legions, IX Hispana, then in Pannonia, II Augusta, XIV Gemina, and XX Valeria Victrix, plus approximately 20,000 auxiliary troops, including Thracians and Batavians. In this occasion, II Augusta was commanded by the future emperor Vespasian. Three other men of appropriate rank to command legions are known to have been involved in the invasion: Vespasian's brother Titus Flavius Sabinus II and Gnaeus Hosidius Geta appear in Dio Cassius's account of the invasion; Gnaeus Sentius Saturninus is mentioned by Eutropius, although as a former consul he may have been too senior, and perhaps accompanied Claudius later. On the beaches of northern Gaul Plautius faced a mutiny by his troops, who were reluctant to cross the Ocean and fight beyond the limits of the known world. They were persuaded after Claudius's freedman and secretary Narcissus addressed them: seeing a former slave in place of their commander, they cried "Io Saturnalia!" (Saturnalia being a Roman festival in which social roles were reversed for the day) and the mutiny was over. The invasion force sailed in three divisions, and is generally believed to have landed at Richborough in Kent, although parts may have landed elsewhere (see Site of the Claudian invasion of Britain). The Britons, led by Togodumnus and Caratacus of the Catuvellauni, were reluctant to fight a pitched battle, relying on instead on guerrilla tactics. However, Plautius defeated first Caratacus, then Togodumnus, on the rivers Medway and Thames. Togodumnus died shortly afterwards, although Caratacus survived and continued to be a thorn in the invaders' side. Having reached the Thames, Plautius halted and sent for Claudius, who arrived with elephants and heavy artillery and completed the march on the Catuvellaunian capital, Camulodunum (Colchester). A Roman province was established in the conquered territory, and alliances made with nations outside direct Roman control. Plautius became governor of the new province, until 47 when he was replaced byPublius Ostorius Scapula. On his return to Rome and civil life, Plautius was granted an Ovation, during which the emperor himself walked by his side to and from the Capitol.

St. Gerren,King of Dumnonia
Born circa AD 552
Pronounced in Welsh, Gereint ! in Latin, Gerontius ! in English, Gereint ! he was Saint Constantine's son, "Gereint rac Dehau" or "Gerren for the South" was immortalised by Aneirin in his epic poem Y Gododdin. It tells of King Gerren's valiant death in 598, when the Celtic kingdoms under Kings Mynyddog Mwynfawr (the Wealthy) of Din-Eidyn (Edinburgh) & Cynan of Gododdin (Lothian) rode south to fight Saxon Bernicia against enormous odds at the Battle of Catreath (Catterick, Yorks). However, it seems that Gerren may have only been mortally wounded at the battle, dying some days later. While fleeing to Brittany to escape plague in Wales, Saint. Teilo was entertained by King Gerren at his castle of Dingerein near the village of Gerrans on the Roseland Penninsula. He promised the King, he would not die without taking communion from the saint. Teilo did not return for seven years, when his ship was greeted by Dumnonian courtiers who emplored him to hasten to the dying King's side. Gerren was overjoyed to see his friend's return. He received the host and died in Teilo's arms. Far away, in Brittany, St. Turiau, saw his soul ascending to heaven. His body, in full regalia, was placed in a great sarcophagus on a huge golden ship that slipped down "The Mermaid's Hole" and into the sea. He was then rowed across Gerrans Bay using solid silver oars and buried, ship and all, beneath the great barrow of Carne Beacon near Veryan. He waits, sword in hand, for the day when he will return to reclaim his Kingdom. Though excavated in 1855 no gold or silver, let alone a great ship, was found, only a small cist burial. Admittedly, the digging did only concentrate on the centre of the mound. The mermaid tunnel between the Dumnonian Royal Palace and the sea was said to have been rediscovered by a farmer in the 19th century. Gerren is revered as a saint at Gerrans parish church, at Magor in Gwent and at several sites in Brittany.

Carne Beacon, Veryan, Cornwall

Carne Beacon, Cornwall  Os grid reference SW9126 3863. On the hilltop overlooking the beautiful Gerrans Bay in south Cornwall stands a fairly prominent ancient burial mound or round barrow (tumulus), dating from prehistoric times, rather than the more recent so-called Dark Ages, as was often thought from the Cornish legend of the saintly King Gerrenius. The man-made mound known as ‘Carne Beacon’ is covered in trees, bushes and grass and stands at the south-side of a farmer’s field (near Churchtown farm) ringed by a barbed-wire fence, but with a gate at one side for access. The site can be reached from the village of Veryan 1 mile to the north, or from the hamlet of Carne half a mile south, via footpaths around the edges of the field where the mound is located. The A3078 St Just and Tregony road is roughly one-and-a-half miles to the west of Carne Beacon. Just to the north of the ancient burial mound are the earthworks of an Iron-Age fort or settlement known as ‘the Veryan Rounds’. Carn Beacon is between 15 and 28 feet (up to 6 metres) in height, depending on which part of it you’re standing on, and it has a circumference around the base of 370 feet (113 metres). During World War II it was used as a lookout post; a concrete pillar can still be seen on the top of the mound from this structure. It is considered to be the largest Bronze-Age burial mound in England. According to the ‘often accepted’ legend, a golden boat with golden oars was buried inside the mound in the 6th century AD along with a Dark-Age king; the boat in question had been rowed across Gerrans Bay from Dingerrin carrying the body of the saintly King Gerrenius (Geraint) of Dumnonia (Devon) who had died in his palace there circa 555 AD. But there was also a St Geraint or Gerran who lived about the same time and founded the church of St Gerrans-in-Roseland, which has rather added confusion to the legend, perhaps, although we known that a certain King Geraint figured in the ‘Register of Llandaff’ concerning St Theliau (Teilo) a 6th century Welsh churchman who had cause to travel through this part of the country on his travels to Brittany at that particular time and was well received by that king; so are the two saints Gerrenius and Geraint one and the same, quite probably. One legend informs us that St Just, son of King Geraint, had been converted to christianity by the Irish female saint, Boriana (Buryan). St Just in Roseland, Cornwall, is named for him. A St Geraint is commemorated on the 16th May. Some accounts also confuse things more by saying that King Gerrenius lived in the 7th or 8th century? The antiquarian, John Whittaker, in his work ‘The Ancient Cathedral of Cornwall’ says that “when Gerrenius died, he was brought from his castle of Dingerein and ferried with great pomp across Gerrans Bay in a barge plated with gold”. The site of Dingerein or Dingerrin castle, a sort of crescent-shaped earthwork, can be found near Trewithian, Cornwall, some 4 miles to the west of Carne Beacon. It seems that the good Dr Whittaker never got the chance to excavate the great mound, even though the local people had got word that he was going to do so and had been given the ‘day off’ work for this wonderful event.

Carne Beacon

In 1855 the mound was finally excavated, but sadly, or perhaps unfortunately, no golden boat with golden oars was found – only a cist-type grave inside slabs of stone, like a small chamber, was found along with some ashes of burnt bones and charcoal. Whether these ashes were those of King Gerrenius of Dumnonia we may never know. But this very ‘fanciful’ legend has proved to be a good story told down the centuries. The cist grave (cairn) would most probably date from the Bronze-Age. The almost circular-shaped earthworks a short distance to the north of Carne Beacon is all that now remains of an Iron-Age hillfort or settlement that is locally called ‘the Rounds’, ‘Veryan Rounds’ or ‘the Ringarounds’.

Sources:

Whittaker, John Dr., The Ancient Cathedral of Cornwall History Surveyed, (2 vols), London, 1804.

Westwood, Jennifer, Gothick Cornwall, Shire Publications Ltd., Princess Risborough, Buckinghamshire, 1992.

Readers Digest., Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain, Readers Digest Association Limited., London, 1977.

Farmer, David., The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, (5th Edition), Oxford University Press, 2004.

Spencer, Ray., A Guide to the Saints of Wales and the West Country, Llanerch Enterprises, Lampeter, Dyfed, 1991

Dingerein Castle, a later prehistoric multivallate hillfort, stands as a testament to Cornwall’s rich history and folklore. Located near Veryan, the hillfort spans roughly 135 meters across and originally comprised two concentric ramparts separated by a ditch, with an external ditch enclosing the entire site. Today, traces of the inner rampart remain visible as a bank on the north and west sides and as a scarp on the east. The concentric outer rampart endures as a prominent earthwork, now integrated into boundary banks around the north, west, and south. Local tradition holds that Dingerein Castle once served as the palace of King Gerennius, a 6th-century ruler of Cornwall. Although much of its structure has been reduced to tumbledown banks and mounds, its crescent-shaped layout, now enclosed on two sides by roads, remains an evocative link to its storied past. Carne Beacon, also known as the Veryan Barrow, is a Bronze Age burial mound that dominates the landscape near Veryan Churchtown. Measuring approximately 40 meters in diameter and 5.5 meters high, it is among the largest barrows in the UK. Positioned at one of the highest points on The Roseland Peninsula, it offers breathtaking views over Gerrans Bay. While its origins date back thousands of years before the time of King Gerennius, local folklore connects the mound to his legendary burial. Tradition tells that the king’s body was ferried across Gerrans Bay in a golden boat with silver oars before being interred beneath the mound, still clad in his royal regalia. Excavations conducted in 1855 revealed a central cist burial containing ash and charcoal, as well as evidence of multiple secondary cremations. However, no artifacts or treasures were found to substantiate the tale of the golden boat or royal burial. The connection between Dingerein Castle and Carne Beacon is further enriched by the legend of the Mermaid’s Hole, a subterranean tunnel said to link the castle to the coast. According to tradition, the body of King Gerennius was transported down this passage to a waiting boat that carried him to Carne Beacon for burial. In the 19th century, a farmer accidentally rediscovered the tunnel while plowing his field, and the antiquarian Cyrus Redding later described it as large enough for a man to enter upright before narrowing to a crawl space. This tunnel, thought to be an old sally port, adds another layer of mystery to the site’s history. Antiquarian John Whittaker wrote of the royal funeral procession, speculating that the golden barge carrying the king’s remains mixed the grandeur of reality with the embellishments of tradition, leaving an indelible mark on the folklore of the Roseland Peninsula. King Gerennius’s life and death are steeped in both legend and historical accounts. According to the Register of Llandaff, the king welcomed Bishop Teliau, who fled Wales in 588 AD to escape a plague, and treated him and his followers with great honor. The record recounts that King Gerennius received the Eucharist from Teliau shortly before his death, an event later immortalized in Cornish tradition. After his passing, his remains were said to have been transported with great pomp across Gerrans Bay to Carne Beacon. While archaeological investigations have yet to uncover definitive evidence of this storied burial, the tales of King Gerennius, his palace at Dingerein Castle, and his supposed interment at Carne Beacon continue to captivate, intertwining Cornwall’s ancient history with its enduring folklore.

         The Dumnonii of Devon and Cornwall

were not as advanced as their neighbours in Dorset and Somerset , nor as most other contemporary tribes of lowland Britain. They struck no coins, and for internal exchange seem to have relied on iron currency-bars, a hoard of which has been found at Holne Chase near Ashburton. These, whose value lay in the fact that they could be converted by any smith into implements or weapons, were made in several standard sizes. Coins of Gaulish and of other British peoples however have been found at Mount Batten (Plymouth), showing that some overseas trad­ing existed long before the coming of the Romans.Besides the use of the rivers, inland movement was possible along the ridgeways, which followed watersheds, avoiding valley forests and swamps. These tracks had been in use since early Bronze Age times, and ran close to many hill-forts. Some remain in use as roads today, and one forms a long stretch of the county border on Exmoor.

The Iron age produced most, if not all, of the earthwork forts which still crown hill-tops and clif1s in the Devon landscape. Their construction seems to have begun in the third century BC, in response to further waves of invasion, and to have continued with new building or strengthening for two hundred years. Few sites have yet been properly excavated, and the events of this period are at present less clear than, for example, in Dorset. Evidence suggests that successive invaders crossed the sea from Brittany, established themselves at first near the estuaries of the south coast, and then penetrated inland, either building forts themselves or causing the previous inhabitants to do so for protection. The earliest examples show a single line of rampart and ditch, either cutting off the neck of a headland (‘promon­tory fort’) or following the contour of a hill-top. The ramparts were often revetted with stone or turf or timber, to give a more perpendicular profile than is seen today. One such, Cranbrook above the upper Teign, was never finished, possibly because those building it were attacked and overwhelmed before they could do so. Later forts were built or remodelled with two or more lines of rampart, following the introduction of sling-warfare from Brittany in the first century BC, and the outstanding example in Devon is Hembury near Honiton. This crowns a bold promontory with close-set double or triple lines, designed not for successive defence but to keep attackers at a distance where the defenders, shooting downhill, could reach them without being hit in return. Digging here has revealed stocks of sling-pebbles, signs of a stockade on the inner rampart, and timber platforms for slingers at the gates. This is one of a group in the south-east of the county, possibly built to resist the warlike Durotriges of Dorset, but equally possibly taken over and reconstructed by them— since Duro­trigan pottery has been found in the later layers.A peculiar type of defended settlement, found only in Devon and Cornwall, appeared in the first century BC. These were built on a slope rather than a hill-top, and had widely spaced concentric en­closures. One such, at Milber near Newton Abbot, has an almost rectangular centre, presumably for habitation. Two outer enclosures were probably for stock, while a larger but indefensible one may have been for cultivation. At Clovelly Dykes in North Devon is a similar example, probably representing a separate invasion by the same people by way of the Bristol Channel. By no means all the Iron Age population lived in or near the forts, though their distribution on the map may be some guide to the most populated parts of the country at the time. The commonest type of settlement was probably in undefended farmsteads, and remained so throughout the Roman period; but these, unlike the forts, are difficult to trace. Most Iron Age farming in Devon was still mainly pastoral rather than arable, and many small ring-works may have served as cattle-enclosures rather than as defences.

The climate of the Iron Age was, comparatively cool and wet, making the higher ground previously used by Bronze Age people no longer habitable, while the valley soils had not yet been opened up by clearance and drainage. Most of the Iron Age popu­lation seems to have lived somewhere near the 500-foot (150-metre) contour. The Dumnonii of Devon (and Cornwall) were not as advanced as their neighbours in Dorset and Somerset, nor as most other contemporary tribes of lowland Britain. They struck no coins, and for internal exchange seem to have relied on iron currency-bars, a hoard of which has been found at Holne Chase near Ashburton. These, whose value lay in the fact that they could be converted by any smith into implements or weapons, were made in several standard sizes. Coins of Gaulish and of other British peoples however have been found at Mount Batten (Plymouth), showing that some overseas trad­ing existed long before the coming of the Romans. Besides the use of the rivers, inland movement was possible along the ridgeways, which followed watersheds, avoiding valley forests and swamps. These tracks had been in use since early Bronze Age times, and ran close to many hill-forts. Some remain in use as roads today, and one forms a long stretch of the county border on Exmoor. it is possible that Isca Dumnoniorum was depicted as prominent in some way, perhaps isolated on a promontory or, as seems more likely, as the gateway to a peninsula (as suggested by Rivet & Smith 1979, 200). In this way the Cosmographer might have decided to break his text at a point which appeared dictated by the geography of the region. He does so further north, where his listing of the Antonine Wall forts occurs ‘where that same Britain is seen to be narrowest from sea to sea’ (ubi et ipsa britania plus angustissima de oceano in oceanum esse dinoscitur 10750 to 10751). Although this was not the primary reason for inserting a break at this latter point, the Cosmographer was clearly sensitive to the depicted shape of the island.
On the other hand, we should perhaps take into account the curious fact that the Civitas Dumnoniorum (basically the Cornish peninsula west of Exeter) appears to have been a part of Britain virtually unaffected by those changes to élite behaviour usually termed ‘romanisation’.

Pytheas of Massalia (Ancient Greek: Πυθέας ὁ Μασσαλιώτης; Latin: Pitheas Massiliae; fl. 4th century BC), was a Greek geographer and explorer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille). He made a voyage of exploration to north western Europe in

Then again towards the North of Europe , there is evidently a quantity of gold by far larger than in any other land:

as to how it is got , here again I am not able to say for certain , but it is said to be carried off from the griffins by Arimaspians, a one-eyed race of men. But I do not believe this tale either, that nature produces one-eyed men which in all other respects are like other men. However it would seem that the extremities which bound the rest of the world on every side and enclose it in the midst possess the things which by us are thought to be the most beautiful and the most rare. This is a point in which all "Devonians” and, indeed ,dwellers in the three western counties of Somerset , Devon and Cornwall may be especially interested.“ Dumnonia, ” like “ Demetia ” and “ Demetica regio", is a very ancient geographical term and the Dumnonii certainly go back to Roman times and were noted for their sea fairing qualities.

In King Alfred’s time “ Dumnonia” was used by the King’s Biographer, Bishop Asser, and would certainly mean a good deal more than we now mean by the County of Devon which meets Somerset at Countisbury Gate and Exmoor.

But until we are sure of the exact meaning of say, " Dumnonia ” and “ Demetica regio how can we follow King Alfred’s great Danish campaign of 878 Historical problems wait for their real solution upon the proper explanation of geographical terms.

Many disputes have turned and still turn upon the exact site of Cynuit and Ethandune, two very momentous fights in our island history........There is an Edington Dumnonia !

THE BRITONS IN WALES AND THE SOUTH-WEST
Following the withdrawal of the Roman administration independent principalities emerged in the west, with war-leaders like Arthur successful for a while in checking the Anglo-Saxon advance westward. Arthur is a shadowy figure (not a king) of the late 5th and early 6th centuries whose exploits were to be greatly elaborated in later medieval verse and prose which tell us little of the real man. The Anglo-Saxon victory of Dyrham in 577 resulted in the separation of Wales from the British south-west; then the events of the early 7th century saw the Welsh cut off from the north by further Anglo-Saxon expansion. The British world of the south west was gradually penetrated by the Anglo-Saxons (but not completely until the 9th century) leading many
Britons to migrate to Armorica - a migration commemorated in the name 'Brittany'. Wales, however, remained independent with its frontier defined by Offa's Dyke. Historical, place-name and archaeological evidence indicate that Irish settlement took place both in north west and in south Wales. But the Welsh language (and Cornish) remains as a descendant of the common British speech of pre Roman Britain.
FORTIFIED SITES IN WALES TO VISIT
At Dinas Powys, near Cardiff, the 6th/7th-century fortified seat of a petty chieftain has been excavated. Evidence for the buildings which stood on the enclosed hill-top was slight, but imported pottery, glass and metalwork were discovered as well as indications that jewellery was being made. Castell Degannwy, in the Irish ogham script (consisting of groups of long and short strokes across a base-line). Such stones are gradually replaced in fashion by slabs with crosses incised or carved in low relief. The final development, from about the 9th century, is elaborately carved cross-slabs and free-standing crosses. All the Welsh stones are collected together in V. E. Nash-Williams, Early Christian Monuments of Wales' (Cardiff, 1950),but the selection plotted on this map is from C. Houlder, 'Wales: an Archaeological Guide' (London,1974).
Groups of stones to visit:
National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Brecknock Museum, Brecon; Margam Abbey Museum, Glamorgan; Carmarthen Museum, Swansea on the river Conwy, and Dinas Emrys, in southern Snowdonia, are craggy hill-top sites in use during the early medieval period. Earlier sites were re-occupied like the great hill-fort of Dinorben in N. Wales, the Breiddin in the east, and the coastal fort of Coygan in S. Wales. A small fort set within the pre-Roman hillfort of Garn Boduan, in Gwynedd, may date to this period, as should another of similar size at Carreg-y-llam. Such small forts may be the descendants of the enclosed homesteads of Gwynedd in the Roman period, by way of enclosed hut-groups like that at Pant-y-saer, on Anglesey.
RELIGIOUS MONUMENTS IN WALES
Standing pre-Conquest ecclesiastical buildings are lacking in Wales, although many important early monastic centres existed, such as Bangor and Llandaff. On a lesser scale, the Roman fort of Caer Gybi (nr. Holyhead) had a monastery founded in it by St. Cybi and, also on Anglesey, there was an important early centre at Penmon founded by St. Seiriol (what may be an early cell survives). The earliest visible remains are typically of 12th century, or later date, as with the early ecclesiastical settlement on the tidal island of Burry Holms, off the Gower peninsula. The present church at Llantwit Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan, contains no traces of its monastic predecessor, but there is a group of fine decorated memorial stones to indicate its former importance. It is in fact such incised and carved stones, known generally as early Christian monuments, that constitute the best archaeological Museum'; St. David’s Cathedral, Dyfed; Penmachno church, Gwynedd; Llantwit Major church Glamorgan; Nevern church. Dyfed . Some important individual stones: Llangadwaladr church, Anglesey (to King Cadfan, or Catamanus', who died c.625); Eliseg's Pillar, Clwyd (9th-century memorial commemorating Elise, 8th-century opponent of Offa of Mercia); Carew, Dyfed (exception ally fine late cross).
BRITISH SITES IN SOUTH WEST ENGLAND
 Fortified sites to visit Chun Castle (Cornwall) is a fine fort of pre-Roman Iron-Age date consisting of two concentric dry stone walls, with compartments in its interior belonging to its 6th-century re-occupation. Castle Dore (Cornwall) is another reused Iron-Age fort, but defended by earthen banks and ditches; excavations have revealed the post-holes of major timber buildings in the interior. The site is traditionally associated with 'King Mark' of the Tristan and Isolde story; some support for this is provided by the near by memorial stone to a 5th/6th century Tristan. Much greater in size are two re-occupied Iron-Age hill-forts in Somerset: Cadbury Congresbury and Cadbury Castle (South Cadbury). At Cadbury Congresbury, limited excavations have demonstrated at least partial re-use in the 5th and 6th centuries, but at South Cadbury more extensive excavations have revealed complex and interesting history.  South Cadbury a The topmost rampart of this early 6th century, with a rubble rampart, reinforced with timbers and with a rough stone facing. This defence is some 1,200 yards in length and encloses about eighteen acres. The south-western of the entrances was excavated and the traces of a massive timber gateway were discovered. Also belonging to this 5th/6th-century re-occupation were timber buildings on the summit of the hill. No trust can be placed on the 16th-century identification of Cadbury Castle with the 'Camelot' of 'King Arthur' of medieval fiction, although its size is without parallel amongst contemporary fortifications and so it must have been the work of some exceptional leader. The next refortification of South Cadbury was by the Anglo-Saxons in the early 11th century, with a masonry wall; the mint of Cadanbyrig was established and building projects put under way, but these plans were soon abandoned. Further reading: L. Alcock, '"By South Cadbury is that Camelot" . The Excavation of Cadbury Castle 1966-70' (London, 1972).  Religious monuments to visit In the south west there are about 40 incised memorial stones, virtually all of which are in Cornwall and Devon with a small group on Lundy.The presence on some of inscriptions in Irish oghams, and the factthat some commemorate men with Irish names, suggests that there was some secondary Irish settlement of East Cornwall West Devon connected with the 5th-century Irish settlement of S. Wales. Note also the 'Tristan' stone (nr. Fowey, Cornwall) mentioned in connection with Castle Dore. It has often been claimed that Tintagel (Cornwall) was a major monastic centre. This dramatic headland was certainly occupied in the 5th and 6th centuries, cut off from the mainland by an earthern rampart, but there is no certain proof at present that this was a monastery rather than a secular stronghold. A similar lack of evidence also makes it impossible to be sure which was the use of an excated evidence for the early Church in Wales. The earliest stones (of 5th- to 7th-century date) are crude memorials with simple epitaphs, some impressive multi-ramparted hill-fort was refortified, in the late 5th orvated settlement of similar date (no remains to be seen) on the top of Glastonbury Tor (Somerset). At Glastonbury Abbey excavation has revealed a rampart (the monastic enclosure) and traces of timber buildings, but nothing that must be earlier in date than the 7th century. Glastonbury Abbey is claimed to be the site of Arthur's burial, but its discovery in 1191 might be no more than a monkish fake.

 Discovery of Great Britain by the Romans.

The mercantile Phoenicians traded to the Scilly islands, the Cassiterides , or land of tin , from the port of Cadiz , four hundred years before Christ. The Romans, for a considerable time, could not discover the place from whence the former procured the precious metal. They attempted to detect the trade, by following the course of a Phoenician vessel; but the master, faithful to the interest of his country, voluntarily run his ship ashore in another place; preferring the loss of all, rather than sillier n. foreign nation to become partakers of so profitable a secret.

The public immediately compensated Iris loss out of its treasury . This did but make the Romans more eager for the discovery; and after many trials they succeeded. Publius Crassus (father of Marcus Crassus the Triumvir) who was praetor, and governed Spain for several years, landed in the Cassiterides, and found the report of their riches verified.

As soon as the Romans made a conquest of the country, they formed in the tin province camps and roads, still visible; and left behind vases, urns, sepulchres, and money, that exhibit daily proofs of their having been a stationary people in those parts” ; and that Dunmonium extended even to the Belerian promontory, or the Land’s-end

TIN COPPER

And was not, as some writers imagine, limited by the western parts of Somersetshire.

It is not to be imagined, that they could neglect a corner of our island, productive of a metal so useful in mechanics as tin, and which it yielded in such plenty, as to receive from that circumstance the name.

So great was the intercourse that foreign nations had with the inhabitants bordering on Belerium, as to give them a greater scavoir vivre, and more extensive hospitality, than was to be found in other parts of the island.

They were equally expert in working the mines, and preparing the ore, which lay in earthy veins within the rocky strata.

They melted and purified it, then cast it into rows of cubes, and carried it to let is, the modern Mount St. Michael: from thence it was transported into Gaul; conveyed from the place it was landed at, on horses’ backs, a journey of thirty days, to the mouth of the Rhone, and also to the Massylians, and the town of Narbonne".

Copper. Did not Caesar and Strabo agree in their account, I should never have believed it possible that the Britons could have neglected their rich mines of copper, and have beenobliged at first to import that metal. Perhaps the ore was less accessible, and the art of fusion unknown; for islands, from their very situation, must remainlonger ignorant of arts than continents; especially ours, which lay far to the west of the origin of all science.

Strabo says, that the Britons imported works of brass; but it is as certain, that they afterwards did themselves fabricate that metal into instruments.

The Celts, a British, instrument, was made in this island.

Numbers have been found in Yorkshire, and Essex", together with cinders, and lumps of melted metal; which evince the place of a forge. The Romans had then founderies of copper in our island; and cast the metal into regular forms.

A mass was found at Caer hen, the antient Conovium, four miles above Conway, which probably was smelted from the ore of the Snowdon hills; where of late years much has been raised.

This mass is in shape of a cake of beeswax; and on the upper part is a deep concave impression, with the words Socio Romae; across these is impressed obliquely, in lesser letters, Natsol.

I cannot explain it, unless Nat. stands for Natio, the people who paid this species of tribute; and sol. for solvit, that being the stamp-master’s mark. These cakes might be bought up hy a merchant resident in Britain, and consigned Socio RomaE, to his partner at Rome.

The weight of this antiquity is forty-two pounds;

 The Ravenna Cosmography identifies a major regional Roman-era settlement  as Nemetostatio in central Dumnonia  identified with North Tawton , Devon , which would translate from Latin as  * The Outpost of the Sacred Grove *

The first section of the Ravenna Cosmography to deal with Britain, covering , is obscure but nevertheless generally recognised as dealing with south-western England . Why it should have been separated out by the Cosmographer is not at all clear. Rivet and Smith (1979, 197) see it as evidence for a special source covering this area in greater detail than the rest of Britain.

This does not seem a necessary hypothesis for reasons to be given. Indeed, the words that introduce the next section, ‘Again, next to the aforementioned civitas Isca Dumnoniorum’ iterum iuxta superscriptam ciuitatem scadumnamorum , strongly hint that the Cosmographer is looking at the same map as he used as a source for this section. We will see many instances of the Cosmographer duplicating names throughout his text, the most startling being *Moridunum* , Sidford, which is repeated no less than four times. However, they are not noticeably more common in this section than in those that follow. Had he employed a special and separate source for the south-west, it is difficult to see how he would have integrated the information he derived from it with that he derived from his main source without making many more such duplications. We would on this hypothesis also expect the following long section which covers the province or diocese of Britannia to contain a few names relating to the south-western peninsula which the Cosmographer had not noticed as duplications: we do not find them. Arguments e silentio are never strong; more telling are the duplications within this section that cannot be the result of taking names from two different sources.  For instance, the name *Antiuesteum* appears twice,  in both cases with virtually the same truncation.This truncation may well have occurred if the first three or four letters of the name were written ‘in the sea’ on the Cosmographer’s postulated map source . The same error of reading is extremely unlikely to have occurred as a result of using two separate source documents.

There are thus no compelling reasons to believe that the Cosmographer was using a separate and fuller source for the south-west of Britain than for the remainder of the island. True enough, the density of names in the peninsula is high, but it is also high in Cumbria  and between the Roman walls . The contrast is not so much with a low density in the remainder of the province, but with specific areas, such as Wales and East Anglia, very poorly represented. This does not solve the problem of why the Cosmographer should have seen Isca Dumnoniorum, Exeter, as a point at which to insert a break in his listing. The Peutinger Table may offer a clue: although Britain is severely truncated, with only East Anglia and Kent appearing on the surviving copy, Moridunum and Isca Dumnoniorum are also shown without any intervening south-coast places. It is possible that Isca Dumnoniorum was depicted as prominent in some way, perhaps isolated on a promontory or, as seems more likely, as the gateway to .

 In this way the Cosmographer might have decided to break his text at a point which appeared dictated by the geography of the region. He does so further north, where his listing of the Antonine Wall forts occurs ‘where that same Britain is seen to be narrowest from sea to sea’ ubi et ipsa britania plus angustissima de oceano in oceanum esse dinoscitur . Although this was not the primary reason for inserting a break at this latter point, the Cosmographer was clearly sensitive to the depicted shape of the island.

On the other hand, we should perhaps take into account the curious fact that the Civitas Dumnoniorum , basically the Cornish peninsula west of Exeter appears to have been a part of Britain virtually unaffected by those changes to élite behaviour usually termed ‘romanisation’. Is it possible that much of it lay outside provincial or diocesan control and that some kind of border was depicted on the Cosmographer’s map source as separating the south-western peninsula from the rest of Britain? In that case, Isca Dumnoniorum may have been prominent as a point of contact between the wilds of the far south-west and the more ‘civilised’ Durotriges (or Durotrages, following RIB 1673: the form of the name is very uncertain according to Rivet & Smith 1979, 352) to the east. Group 1: the Cornish Peninsula V ¶31 in qua britania plurimas fuisse ciuitates et castra legimus ex quibus aliquantas designare uolumus id est:

 Giano Barnstaple  10546

 Eltabo River Taw 10546

 Elconio River Torridge ? 10547

Nemestotatio North Tawton 10547

Tamaris Launceston ? 

 Puro coronauis ? 10548

 Pilais ? 10549

 Vernilis Liskeard ? 10549

 Ardua rauenatone River Dart 10550

 Deuionisso Statio ? 10551

 deuentia steno Buckfastleigh / Totnes ? 10551/10552

 Duriarno Plymouth  10552

 Vxelis Barnstaple ? 1061

 Verteuia Land’s End 1061 = 1069

This group appears to take us on a general perambulation of the Cornish Peninsula and adjacent area

 * Taua, the second name, is clearly the River Taw .

 *Nemetostatio is probably the fort at North Tawton, which is in an area where a group of modern names containing the elements Nymet and Nemet are found .

 The identification of *Conio* with Ptolemy’s  must therefore be questioned as the general progression seems to be from north-east to southwest.

 It may refer the River Torridge, although this is a Celtic name, derived from a Brittonic *Torric-, ‘violent, rough’.

 *Glano* should therefore be somewhere in north Devon, perhaps in the vicinity of Barnstaple.

 Tamaris, this a site on the River Tamar , perhaps at the crossing at Launceston , not the river itself , as the name recurs in the list of river-names . *Durocornouio* and *Pilais*

Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography: a reassessment K J Fitzpatrick-Matthews cannot now be identified. Charles Thomas (1966a, 87) originally identified the former with The Rumps, a pre-Roman defended enclosure.

 More recently, he suggested that it might be Tintagel, the site of an important sub-Roman trading settlement, although its Romano-British status is not clear . *Vernilis* may be the , perhaps near Liskeard ; the correct RomanoBritish form may have been *Verleua.

The Cosmographer’s form would have arisen by way of a transposition of -l- and -u-, the latter being miscopied as -n-. The next name must be for * Deruentione, the River Dart, so the Cosmographer’s eye may have moved from travelling along the spine of Cornwall, following the poorly known road along the centre of the peninsula, and he has possibly now turned his attention to the road south from Exeter, closer to the south Devon coast. Deuionisso Statio and *Deruentio Statio (which are wrongly divided in the text) are probably unlocated Roman government establishments, perhaps tax offices. The latter may have lain in the Dart valley (Dart being Brittonic *Deruentiu: Ekwall 1928, 114), perhaps at Buckfastleigh or Totnes, and the former perhaps near Newton Abbot or elsewhere on the River Teign. The next name, Duriarno, is probably not the same as Durnouaria (Dorchester), as suggested by Rivet & Smith (1979, 345) following Horsley (1732, 490), since it is probably not corrupt (compare the Arnodurum quoted by Williams (Richmond & Crawford 1949, 32), which shows the more usual ‘continental’ ordering of elements). Instead, it may be the name of a site in the vicinity of Plymouth where the inhumation cemetery at Mount Batten and a sequence of coins attest a settlement of some importance (Thomas 1966a, 86). Uxelis is too far west to be the same as Ptolemy’s Οὔξελλα (II.3, 13), which must be on the River Parrett, his Οὐεξάλλα εἴσχυσις (II.3,2), and may be a site or river in Cornwall, perhaps the Fowey or the Fal, unless it is an example of a name written to the west of its symbol on the map source. If this is the case, then it may have been near Barnstaple (Strang 1997, 30). Group 2: the south Devon and Cornish coast  Melamoni Sidford ? 1062 = 1064/1069/10613 Scadumnamorum Exeter , Termonin    Mesteuia - Land’s End

The mention of Moridunum, Sidford , for the first time indicates a change of direction, and there are now hints of an ordering of names with a general progression from east to west. The -l- for -r- in Moridunum is also found in the next section; it may be that the name was very difficult to read in the Cosmographer’s source. It is unlikely to have occurred as a result of misreading two separate documents, further evidence for the essential unity of the Cosmographer’s sources. The unlocated *Terminum would have been somewhere between Exeter and Land’s End, an admittedly imprecise location. The River Gowy in Cheshire was formerly known as the aqua de Tervin (‘water of Tarvin’) in 1209, the name deriving from the Latin terminus, ‘boundary’, via Welsh Terfyn (Dodgson 1970, 26), which has been retained by a large parish and village. Although the origin of the latter name is generally sought in the post-Roman politics of the region (Bu’Lock 1972, 24), it is probable that the River Gowy was the eastern boundary of the prata legionis of the fortress at Chester. Could a similar origin be suggested for this name, at the western boundary of the prata legionis of the early fortress at Exeter or the territorium of the later capital of the CivitasDumnoniorum?

 Somerset  Milidunum Sidford 

Apaunaris Bath 

 Masona Camerton? 1065

 Alouergium Shepton Mallett 1065

The Cosmographer returns to Moridunum, with the same peculiar -l- for -r- as in the previous group, and a similarly logical ordering of names this time jumping north-eastward and then working back to the starting-point identify Apaunaris with Aquae Sulis, Bath, perhaps correctly, so the two remaining names may relate to sites between Bath and Sidford.

<Masona> suggests a name derived from that of a river, although which cannot now be ascertained; it perhaps refers to the small town at Camerton. The name is corrupt. *Alobergium should be in a hilly location, probably near the Mendip Hills at Shepton Mallett, where parts of a Romano-British small town have recently been identified.

Monday 7 May 2018

"PHŒNICIANS IN DART VALE.

BELSTONE

Derivation of the name—Phœnicians—Taw Marsh—Artillery practice on the moors—Encroachments—The East Okement—Pounds and hut circles—Stone rows on Cosdon—Cranmere Pool—Sticklepath—Christian inscribed stones—South Zeal—West Wyke—North Wyke—The wicked Richard Weekes—South Tawton church—The West Okement—Yes Tor—Camp and Roman road—Throwleigh.

AGOOD deal of pseudo-antiquarianism has been expressed relative to the name of a little moorland parish two and a half miles uphill from Okehampton. It is now called Belstone, and it has been surmised that here stood a stone dedicated to Baal, whose worship had been introduced by the Phœnicians.

I must really quote one of the finest specimens of "exquisite fooling" I have ever come across. It appeared as a sub-article in theWestern Morning Newsin 1890.

It was headed: —

"PHŒNICIANS IN DART VALE.

[SPECIAL.]

"Much interest, not only local but world-wide, was aroused a few months back by the announcement of a Phœnician survival at Ipplepen, in the person of Mr. Thomas Ballhatchet, descendant of the priest of the SunTemple there, and until lately owner of the plot of land called Baalford, under Baal Tor, a priestly patrimony, which had come down to him through some eighteen or twenty centuries, together with his name and his marked Levantine features and characteristics.

"Such survivals are not infrequent among Orientals, as, for instance, the Cohens, Aaron's family, the Bengal Brahmins, the Rechabites, etc. Ballhatchet's sole peculiarity is his holding on to the land, in which, however, he is kept in countenance in England by the Purkises, who drew the body of Rufus to its grave in Winchester Cathedral on 2nd August, 1100.

"Further quiet research makes it clear beyond all manner of doubt that the Phœnician tin colony, domiciled at Totnes, and whose Sun Temple was located on their eastern sky-line at Ipplepen, have left extensive traces of their presence all the way down the Dart in the identical andunaltered names of places, a test of which the Palestine Exploration Committee record the priceless value. To give but one instance. The beautiful light-refracting diadem which makes Belliver the most striking of all her sister tors, received from the Semite its consecration as 'Baallivyah,' Baal, crown of beauty or glory. The word itself occurs in Proverbs i. 9 and iv. 9, and as both Septuagint and Vulgate so render it, it must have borne that meaning in the third century B C., and in the third century A.D., and, of course, in the interval. There are many other instances quite as close, and any student of the new and fascinating science of Assyriology will continually add to them. A portrait of Ballhatchet, with some notes by an eminent and well-known Semitic scholar, may probably appear in theGraphic; in the meantime it may be pointed out that hisname is typically Babylonian. Not only is there at Pantellaria the gravestone of one Baal-yachi (Baal's beloved), but no less than three clay tablets from the Sun Temple of Sippara (the Bible Sepharvaim) bear the names of Baal-achi-iddin, Baal-achi-utsur, and Baal-achi-irriba. This last, which bears date 22 Sivan (in the eleventh year of Nabonidus, B.C. 540), just two years before the catastrophe which followed on Belshazzar's feast, is in the possession of Mr. W. G. Thorpe,F.S.A.It is in beautiful condition, and records a loan by one Dinkiva to Baal-achi-irriba (Baal will protect his brother), on the security of some slaves."

One really wonders in reading such nonsense as this whether modern education is worth much, when a man could write such trash and an editor could admit it into his paper.

Ballhatchet means the hatchet or gate to a ball,i.e. a mine.

As it happens, there is not a particle of trustworthy evidence that the Phœnicians ever traded directly with Cornwall and Devon. The intermediary traders were the Veneti of what is now Vannes, and the tin trade was carried through Gaul to Marseilles , as is shown by traces left on the old trade route. In the next place, there is no evidence that our British or Ivernian ancestors ever heard the name of Baal. And finally,Belstoneis not named after a stone at all, to return to the point whence we started. In Domesday it is Bellestham, or the ham, meadow of Belles or Bioll, a Saxon name that remains among us as Beale.

Belstone is situated at the lip of Taw Marsh, once a fine lake, with Steeperton Tor rising above it at the head. Partly because the river has fretted a way through the joints of the granite, forming Belstone Cleave, and partly on account of the silting up of the lake-bed with rubble brought down by the several streams that here unite, the lake-bed is now filled up with sand and gravel and swamp.

The military authorities coveted this tract for artillery practice. They set up butts, but woman intervened. A very determined lady marched up to them, although the warning red flags fluttered, and planted herself in front of a target, took out of her reticule a packet of ham sandwiches and a flask of cold tea, and declared her intention of spending the day there. In vain did the military protest, entreat, remonstrate; she proceeded to nibble at her sandwiches and defied them to fire.

She carried the day.

Since then Taw Marsh has been the playfield of many children, and has been rambled over by visitors, but the artillery have abstained from practising on it.

The fact is that the military have made the moors about Okehampton impossible for the visitor, and those who desire to rove over it in pursuit of health have been driven from Okehampton to Belstone, and object to be moved on further.

What with the camp at Okehampton and the prisons a tPrincetownand encroachments on every side, the amount of moorland left open to the rambler is greatly curtailed.

The privation is not only felt by the visitor but also by the farmer, who has a right to send outhis sheep and cattle upon the moor in summer, and in times of drought looks to this upland as his salvation.

A comparison between what the Forest of Dartmoor was at the beginning of this century and its condition to-day shows how inclosures have crept on—nay, not crept, increased by leaps; and what is true of the forest is true also of the commons that surround it. Add to the inclosed land the large tract swept by the guns at Okehampton, and the case becomes more grave still. The public have been robbed of their rights wholesale. Not a word can now be raised against the military. The Transvaal War has brought home to us the need we have to become expert marksmen, and the Forest of Dartmoor seems to offer itself for the purpose of a practising-ground. Nevertheless, one accepts the situation with a sigh.

There is a charming excursion up the East Okement from the railway bridge to Cullever Steps, passing on the way a little fall of the river, not remarkable for height but for picturesqueness. There is no path, and the excursion demands exertion.

On Belstone Common is a stone circle and near it a fallen menhir. The circle is merely one of stones that formed a hut, which had upright slabs lining it within as well as girdling without.

Under Belstone Tor, among the "old men's workings" by the Taw, an experienced eye will detect a blowing-house , but it is much dilapidated.

The Taw and an affluent pour down from the central bog, one on each side of Steeperton Tor,and from the east the small brook dances into Taw Marsh. Beside the latter, on the slopes, are numerous pounds and hut circles , and near its source is a stone circle ,  of which the best uprights have been carried off for gateposts. South of it is a menhir, the Whitmoor Stone, leaning, as the ground about it is marshy. Cosdon, or, as it is incorrectly called occasionally, Cawsand, is a huge rounded hill ascending to 1,785 feet, crowned with dilapidated cairns and ruined kistvaens . East of the summit, near the turf track from South Zeal, is a cairn that contained three kistvaens. One is perfect, one wrecked, and of the third only the space remained and indications whence the slabs had been torn. From these three kistvaens in one mound start three stone rows that are broken through by the track, but can be traced beyond it for some way; they have been robbed, as the householders of South Zeal have been of late freely inclosing large tracts of their common, and have taken the stones for the construction of walls about their fields.

By ascending the Taw, Cranmere Pool may be reached, but is only so far worth the visit that the walk to and from it gives a good insight into the nature of the central bogs. The pool is hardly more than a puddle. Belstone church is not interesting; it was rebuilt, all but the tower, in 1881. Under Cosdon nestles Sticklepath. "Stickle" is the Devonshire for steep. Here is a holy well near an inscribed stone. A second inscribed stone is by the roadside to Okehampton. At Belstone are two more, but none of these bear names. They areChristian monuments of the sixth, or at latest seventh, century. At Sticklepath was a curious old cob thatched chapel, but this has been unnecessarily destroyed, and a modern erection of no interest or

Inscribed Stone, Sticklepath

beauty has taken its place. South Zeal is an interesting little village, through which ran the old high-road, but which is now left on one side. For long it was a treasury of interesting old houses; many have disappeared recently, but the "Oxenham Arms," the seat of the Burgoyne family, remains, the fine old village cross, and the chapel, of granite.Above South Zeal, on West Wyke Moor, is the house that belonged to the Battishill family, with a ruined cross near it. The house has been much spoiled of late; the stone mullions have been removed from the hall window, but the ancient gateway, surmounted by the Battishill arms, and with the date 1656, remains untouched. It is curious, because one would hardly have expected a country gentleman to have erected an embattled gateway during the Commonwealth, and in the style of the early Tudor kings. In the hall window are the arms of Battishill, impaled with a coat that cannot be determined as belonging to any known family. In the same parish of South Tawton is another old house, North Wyke, that belonged to the Wyke or Weekes family. The ancient gatehouse and chapel are interesting; they belong, in my opinion, to the sixteenth century, and to the latter part of the same. The chapel has a corbel, the arms of Wykes and Gifford; and John Wyke of North Wyke, who was buried in 1591, married the daughter of Sir Roger Gifford. The gateway can hardly be earlier. The house was built by the same man, but underwent great alteration in the fashion introduced from France by Charles II., when the rooms were raised and the windows altered intocroisées.

Touching this house a tale is told.

About the year 1660 there was a John Weekes of North Wyke, who was a bachelor, and lived in the old mansion along with his sister Katherine, who was unmarried, and his mother. He was a manof weak intellect, and was consumptive. John came of age in 1658. In the event of his death without will his heir would be his uncle John, his father's brother, who died in 1680. This latter John had a son Roger.

Now it happened that there was a great scamp of the name of Richard Weekes, born at Hatherleigh, son of Francis Weekes of Honeychurch, possibly a remote connection, but not demonstrably so.

He was a gentleman pensioner of Charles II., but spent most of his leisure time in the Fleet Prison. One day this rascal came down from London, it is probable at the suggestion of consumptive John's mother and sister, who could not be sure what he, with his feeble mind, might do with the estate.

Richard ingratiated himself into the favour of John, and urged him not to risk his health in so bleak and exposed a spot as South Tawton, but to seek a warmer climate, and he invited him to Plymouth. The unsuspicious John assented.

When John was cajoled to Plymouth, Richard surrounded him with creatures of his own, a doctor and two lawyers, who, with Richard's assistance, coaxed, bullied, and persuaded the sickly John into making a deed of settlement of all his estate in favour of Richard. The unhappy man did this, but with a curious proviso enabling him to revoke his act by word as well as by deed. Richard had now completely outwitted John's mother and sister, who had been conspirators with him, on the understanding that they were to share the spoils.

After a while, when it was clear that John was

North Wyke Gate House

dying, Richard hurried him back to North Wyke, where he expired on Saturday, September 2ist,

1661, but not till he had been induced by his mother and sister to revoke his will verbally, for they had now learned how that the wily Richard had got the better of them.

Next day, Sunday, Richard Weekes arrived, booted and spurred, at the head of a party of men he had collected. With sword drawn he burst into the house, and when Katherine Weekes attempted to bar the way he knocked her down. Then he drove the widow mother into a closet and locked the door on her. He now cleared the house of the servants, and proceeded to take possession of all the documents and valuables that the mansion contained. Poor John's body lay upstairs: no regard was paid to that, and, saying "I am come to do the devil's work and my own," he drove Katherine out of the house, and she was constrained to take refuge for the night in a neighbouring farm. The widow, Mary Weekes, was then liberated and also turned out of doors.

The heir-at-law was the uncle John, against whom Mary and Katherine Weekes had conspired with the scoundrel Richard. This latter now sought Uncle John, made him drunk, and got him to sign a deed, when tipsy, conveying all his rights to the said Richard for the sum of fifty pounds paid down. Richard was now in possession. The widow thereupon brought an action in Chancery against Richard. The lawyers saw the opportunity. Here was a noble estate that might be sucked dry, and they descended on it with this end in view.

The lawsuit was protracted for forty years, from 1661 to 1701, when the heirs of the wicked Richard retained the property, but it had been so exhausted and burdened, that the suit was abandoned undecided. Richard Weekes died in 1670.

The plan resorted to in order to keep possession after the forcible entry was this. The son of Richard Weekes had married a Northmore of Well, in South Tawton, and the Northmores bought up all the debts on the estate and got possession of the mortgages, and worked them persistently and successfully against the rightful claimants till, worried and wearied out, and with empty purses, they were unable further to pursue the claim. In 1713 the estate was sold by John Weekes, the grandson of Richard, who had also married a Northmore, and North Wyke passed away from the family after having been in its possession since the reign of Henry III.

It was broken up into two farms, and the house divided into two. Recently it has, however, been repurchased by a descendant of the original possessors, in a female line, the Rev. W. Wykes Finch, and the house is being restored in excellent taste.

In South Tawton church is a fine monument of the common ancestor, John Wyke, 1591. The church has been renovated, monumental slabs sawn in half and used to line the drain round the church externally. With the exception of the sun-dial, bearing the motto from Juvenal, "Obrepet non intellecta senectus"and a Burgoyne monument and that of "Warrior Wyke," the church does not present muchof interest at present, whatever it may have done before it fell into the hands of spoilers.

The West Okement comes down from the central bogs through a fine "Valley of Rocks," dividing and forming an islet overgrown with wild rose and whortleberry. Above it stands Shilstone Tor, telling by its name that on it at one time stood a cromlech, which has been destroyed. This valley furnishes many studies for the artist.

Hence Yes Tor may be ascended, for long held to be the highest elevation on Dartmoor. The highest peak it is, rising to 2,030 feet, but it is over-topped by the rounded High Willhayes, 2,039 feet. Between Yes Tor and Mill Tor is a rather nasty bog. Mill Tor consists of a peculiar granite; the feldspar is so pure that speculators have been induced to attempt to make soda-water bottles out of it, by fusing without the adjunct of other materials.

On the extreme edge of a ridge above the East Okement, opposite Belstone Tor, is a camp, much injured by the plough. Apparently from it leads a paved raised causeway or road, presumed to be Roman; but why such a road should have been made from a precipitous headland above the Okement, and whither it led, are shrouded in mystery. Near this road, in 1897, was found a hoard of the smallest Roman coins, probably the store of some beggar, which he concealed under a rock, and died without being able to recover it. All pertained to the years between A.D. 320 and 330.

Of Okehampton I will say nothing here, as the place has had a chapter devoted to it in myBook ofthe West—too much space, some might say, for in itself it is devoid of interest. Its charm is in the scenery round, and its great attraction during the summer is the artillery camp on the down above Okehampton Park. On the other side of Belstone, Throwleigh may be visited, where there are numerous prehistoric relics. There were many others, but they have been destroyed, amongst others a fine inclosure like Grimspound, but more perfect, as the inclosing wall was not ruinous throughout, and the stones were laid in courses. The pulpit of Throwleigh church is made up of old bench-ends.

No doubt there were all along tares mingled with the wheat.

The Church of the first three centuries was never, except perhaps on the day of Pentecost, in an absolutely ideal condition. But yet during the ages of persecution, the Church as a whole was visibly an unworldly institution . It was a spiritual empire in recognized antagonism with the world-empire.But from the time of the conversion of Constantine, a .d . 312, and still more completely from the time of Theodosius the Great, a d 379 , the Church and . the world seemed, in some respects at any rate, to have made terms with each other.The world, without ceasing to be the world, was no longer outside, but had been admitted within the sacred enclosure.And that Roman world of the fourth century, what a detestable world it was ! On this point Christian writers of every school seem to be agreed.The fervent and eloquent Roman Catholic Montalembert quotes and adopts the words of the Protestant Guizot, who says, “ The sovereigns and the immense majority of the people had embraced Christianity;but at bottom civil society was pagan; it retained the institutions, the laws, and the manners of paganism.It was a society which paganism, and not Christianity, had made.” 1 Montalembert adds that “ this paganism . . . was paganism under its most degenerate form . , . Nothing,” he says, “ has............... ever equalled the abject condition of the Romans of the empire. . . . With the ancient freedom, all virtue, all manliness disappeared. There remained only a society of officials , without strength , without honour , and without rights. . . . We must acknowledge that in this so-called Christian society, the moral poverty is a thousand times greater than the material, and that servitude has crushed souls more than bodies. Everything is enervated, attenuated, and decrepit. Not a single great man, nor illustrious individual rises to the surface of that mire. Eunuchs and sophists of the court govern the state without control, experiencing no resistance but from the Church.” These last words guard Montalembert’s meaning. He is speaking of civil society, which was now nominally inside the Church; but, side by side with this Christianized paganism, the Church still handed on the glorious traditions which had been bequeathed to her by the age of the martyrs. Though it may be true that the civil society of the fourth and fifth centuries produced no great men, yet the hierarchy the Church produced a galaxy of heroes. Let me state only five, Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil , Saint Ambrose, Saint Christostum and Saint Augustine. A religious institution which can produce such splendid names is full of life; but nevertheless the church whioh had admitted the world within her precincts, was in a very different condition from the Church during the first three centuries of her

 Guizot, Histoire de la Civilization en France, leot. 11., quoted in Montalembert’s Monks of the West (English tram, 1861, i. 263). silchester Historic Scenes along the Norwich Road By Charles G. Harper Historian of the British Highways Chapter XL1VThe old coaching road to Norwich,

Roman influence on Britain

The materials produced are quite unlike the early Roman pottery usually found, which has much Belgic influence in Wollaston in the 2nd century, and soon became surrounded by suburban ‘overspill’. In the large areas between these were very many villa-farms and smaller steads. The villa-farms generally occupied only a few acres, and so are too small to be called villages, but were rather larger than single-family modern farms. They supported the Roman Imperial economy by cattle-rearing and agriculture.

Many farms were superimposed on previous Belgic or Iron Age farm sites, and probably to a certain extent used the same field systems and employed the original Celtic populace as labourers.
Proof of a continuity of Iron Age traditions came from the various hut-circle ditches found on Roman sites. At Wollaston, off Hinwick Road, a hut circle of diameter 40 feet with an entrance 13 feet wide had an off-centre hearth made of two large roofing tiles. Both of these tiles had numerals incised on them before firing. In the ditch was a large quantity of early 2nd century a.d. pottery44.
At Deanshanger, similar penannular ditches were found 46.

Gravel workings at Ringstead revealed a hut circle underlying a stone-built circular structure 30 feet in diameter 46. The most complicated stone examples known in the neighbourhood are at Bozeat. One, dating from the early 3rd century, is 48 feet in diameter with four central pier, or post, bases and a few cross walls47.
Only a few such structures are known, and the plan is near-identical with an Iron Age wooden structure at Little Woodbury, Wilts., dating from c. 300 B.C.48. At an estate south of Bozeat High Street there is another site with circular buildings, also of the 3rd century49. Examples have also been discovered in Oxfordshire50.
Villa-farms are certainly the norm of the many Romano-British sites scattered over the whole of Northamptonshire. A few of them had central heating, bath suites, mosaic floors, and painted walls. At Easton Maudit, trial excavations revealed a substantial building with hypocaust box tiles (used to conduct hot air along the walls) and a crude mosaic floor. This was substantially built with a layer of hard-core supporting firm mortar which supported a white very hard plaster in which the stones were embedded. Instead of a design composed of different coloured stones, the floor was made of small stones with a design painted on. Recently a fine floor has been discovered at Thenford61. Several have been known for many years, e.g. those at Nether Heyford noted by Morton (in 1712) and by the Victoria County History.
Bath suites are usually only recognized by large scale excavation. Total excavation of a villa at Brixworth, north of the church, revealed a complicated bath suite with hot and cold compartments . At least two of the Roman sites known at Wollaston seem likely to have been villas, according to the debris in the top soil. A fine aerial photograph of the villa site near Cut-Throat Bridge shows the plan, with a corridor and series of rooms, and some surrounding enclosures.
Painted wall-plaster does not survive in ploughsoil, and so is only known at those sites that have been excavated. At the Brixworth villa several motifs were recovered, and at the housing estate at Bozeat a considerable quantity of fine quality 3rd-century plaster survived in the building debris.
Of the Roman towns there is a very imperfect plan of Chester made by Baker, vicar of Hargrave, in 1879, showing various buildings including a temple. In the 1920s and 1930s many rich finds were found during ironstone quarrying in the cemetery east of the town. These now seem to be lost for the most part, except for some bowls in Northampton Museum. Aerial photographs show the road-plan of Chester to consist of winding lanes rather than the usual grid pattern. These probably represent a continuity from an Iron Age settlement53.
Excavation and aerial photographs at Castor have led to the compilation of a very complicated plan, but again outside the town proper, and not at all regular54.
Of Roman industry there are many remains, principally relating to potters. The invading legions brought with them their own potters, who operated wherever the military was stationed. Such a site has recently been found at Longthorpe. The materials produced are quite unlike the early Roman pottery usually found, which has much Belgic influence. Early kilns, dating from the late 1st century, have been found under the circular buildings at Bozeat. The area of the Nene valley east of Northampton was the centre of an early industry; this, however, later became less important. In later Roman times, the area north of the town of Durobrivae in the parish of Castor was the centre of a very large pottery. The main products were colour-coated wares, often with fine relief designs, finished in white on a black or red background. This pottery was traded throughout the country.
The other industry practised in the south and north of the county was iron smelting. Large areas of black dense slag can be found in fields in the old Rockingham Forest. Each represents a bloomery site where iron was smelted. Some of these sites are several miles away from the nearest ironstone because it was easier to carry the ore to the wooded areas where charcoal was made. This was because the ratio of iron to charcoal needed is about 1:5. Recent excavations of a slag patch at Wakerley55 showed the small clay furnace to be quite miniscule, about 9 inches in diameter. Analysis of the slag shows that no flux was used, and much iron remains as dense black silicate.

Industry and agriculture meet in the process of corndrying. The sitesio Wollaston
in the 2nd century, and soon became surrounded by suburban ‘overspill’. In the large areas between these were very many villa-farms and smaller steads. The villa-farms generally occupied only a few acres, and so are too small to be called villages, but were rather larger than single-family modern farms. They supported the Roman Imperial economy by cattle-rearing and agriculture. Many farms were superimposed on previous Belgic or Iron Age farm sites, and probably to a certain extent used the same field systems and employed the original Celtic populace as labourers.
Proof of a continuity of Iron Age traditions came from the various hut-circle ditches found on Roman sites. At Wollaston, off Hinwick Road, a hut circle of diameter 40 feet with an entrance 13 feet wide had an off-centre hearth made of two large roofing tiles. Both of these tiles had numerals incised on them before firing. In the ditch was a large quantity of early 2nd century a.d. pottery . At Deanshanger, similar penannular ditches were found. Gravel workings at Ringstead revealed a hut circle underlying a stone-built circular structure 30 feet in diameter. The most complicated stone examples known in the neighbourhood are at Bozeat. One, dating from the early 3rd century, is 48 feet in diameter with four central pier, or post, bases and a few cross walls.
Only a few such structures are known, and the plan is near-identical with an Iron Age wooden structure at Little Woodbury, Wilts., dating from c. 300 B.C.48. At an estate south of Bozeat High Street there is another site with circular buildings, also of the 3rd century49. Examples have also been discovered in Oxfordshire50.
Villa-farms are certainly the norm of the many Romano-British sites scattered over the whole of Northamptonshire.

A few of them had central heating, bath suites, mosaic floors, and painted walls.At Easton Maudit, trial excavations revealed a substantial building with hypocaust box tiles (used to conduct hot air along the walls) and a crude mosaic floor.This was substantially built with a layer of hard-core supporting firm mortar which supported a white very hard plaster in which the stones were embedded. Instead of a design composed of different coloured stones, the floor was made of small stones with a design painted on. Recently a fine floor has been discovered at Thetford6. Several have been known for many years,

e.g. those at Nether Heyford noted by Morton (in 1712) and by the Victoria County History.
Bath suites are usually only recognized by large scale excavation. Total excavation of a villa at Brixworth, north of the church, revealed a complicated bath suite with hot and cold compartments52.
At least two of the Roman sites known at Wollaston seem likely to have general plan and some details o f every great work of art, of ruinous or entire, before the mind can properly apply which belong to it. In Stonehenge this especially necessary; for however the imagination by the magnitude o f those masses of stone which in their places, by the grandeur even of the fragments
or broken in'their fall, by the consideration of the vast required to bring such ponderous substances to this desolate
spot, and by surmise o f the nature of.the mechanical skill by which they were lifted up and placed in order and proportion, it is not till the entire plan is fully comprehended that we can properly
surrender ourselves to the contemplations which belong to this remarkable scene. It is then, when we can figure to ourselves a
perfect structure, composed of such huge materials symmetrically arranged, and possessing, therefore, that beauty which is the result
of symmetry, that we can satisfactorily look back through the dim light of history or tradition to the object for which such a structure
was destined. The belief now appears tolerably settled that Stonehenge was a temple of the Druids. It differs, however, from all other Druidical remains, in the circumstance that greater mechanical art was employed in its construction, especially in the superincumbent stones of the outer circle and of the trilithons, fromwhich it is supposed to derive its name; stan being the Saxon for a stone, and heng to hang or support. From this circumstance it is maintained that Stonehenge is of the very latest ages of Druidism; and that the Druids that wholly belonged to the ante-historic period
followed the example of those who observed the command of the law : “ If thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.” (Exodus, chap. xx.) Regarding Stonehenge as a work of masonry and architectural proportions, Inigo Jones came to the conclusion that it was a Roman Temple of the Tuscan order. This was an architect’s dream. Antiquaries, with less of taste and fancy that Inigo Jones, have had their dreams also about Stonehenge, almost as wild as the legend of Merlin flying away with the stones
from the Curragh of Kildare. Some attribute its erection to the Britons after the invasion of the Romans. Some bring it down to as recent a period as that of the usurping Danes. Others again
carry it back to the early days of the Phoenicians. The first notice of Stonehenge is found in the writings of Nennius, who lived in the ninth century of the Christian era. He says that at the spot
where Stonehenge stands a conference was held between Hengist and Vortigern, at which Hengist treacherously murdered four
hundred and sixty British nobles, and that their mourning survivors erected the temple to commemorate the fatal event. Mr. Davies, a modern writer upon Celtic antiquities, holds that Stonehenge
was the place of this conference between the British and Saxon princes, on account of its venerable antiquity and peculiar sanctity.
There is a passage in Diodorus Siculus, quoted from Hecataeus, which describes a round temple in Britain dedicated to Apollo; and this Mr. Davies concludes to have been Stonehenge. By another writer, Dr. Smith, Stonehenge is maintained to have been “ the grand orrery of the Druids,” representing, by combinations of its stones, the ancient solar year, the lunar month, the twelve signs of
the zodiac, and the seven planets. Lastly, Stonehenge has been pronounced to be a temple of Budha, the Druids being held to be race of emigrated Indian philosophers. Startling as this last assertion may appear to be, a variety of facts irresistibly lead to the conclusion that the circles, the stones of memorial, the cromlechs, and other monuments of the highest antiquity in these islands, have a distinct resemblance to other monuments of the same character scattered over Asia and Europe, and even found in the New World, which appear to have had a common origin. In Great Britain and Ireland, in Jersey and Guernsey, in France, in Germany in Denmark and Sweden, such monuments are found extensively dispersed. They are found also, though more rarely in the Netherlands. Portugal, and M alta in Gozo and Phoenicia. But their presence is also unquestionable in Malabar, in India, in Palestine, in Persia. Figures 7 and 8 represent a Druidical circle, and a single upright stone standing alone near the circle, which are described by Sir William Ouseley him at Darab, in the province of Fars. in are copied from those in Sir William Ouseley them upon the same page with the If we had obliterated the Oriental figures might easily receive them as from another point of view. The book We have the general arrangement of Stonehenge, and other similar monuments of Europe, led Sir William Ouseley to the natural conclusion that a “ British Antiquary might be almost authorised to pronounce it Druidical, according to the general application of the word
among us.” A t Darab there is a peculiarity which is not found at Stonehenge, at least in its existing state. Under several of the stones there are recesses, or small caverns. In this particular, and
in the general rudeness of its construction, the circle of Darab resembles the Druidical circle of Jersey ,. although the circle there is very much smaller, and the stones o f very inconsiderable
dimensions,— a copy in miniature of such vast works as those of Stonehenge and Avebury. This singular monument, which was found buried under the earth, was removed some fifty years ago by General Conway, to his seat near Henley, the stones being placed in his garden according to the original plan. When we open the great store-house not only of divine truth but of authentic history, we find the clearest record that circles of stone were set up for sacred and solemn purposes. The stones which were taken by Joshua out o f the bed of the Jordan, and set up in Gilgal, supply the most remarkable example. The name Gilgal
itself signifies a circle. Gilgal subsequently became a place not only of sacred observances, but for the more solemn acts of secular government. It was long a controversy, idle enough as ‘'such
controversies generally are, whether Stonehenge was appropriated to religious or to civil purposes. If it is to be regarded as a Druidical monument, the discussion is altogether needless; for the Druids were, at one and the same time, the ministers of religion, the legislators, the judges, amongst the people. The account which Julius Caesar gives of the Druids of Gaul, marked as it is by his usual clearness and sagacity, may be received without hesitation as a description of the Druids of Britain : for he says, “ the system of Druidism is thought to have been formed in Britain, and from thence carried over into Gaul ; and now those who wish to be more accurately versed in it for the most part go thither (/. e. to Britain)
in order to become acquainted with it.” Nothing can be more explicit than his account of the mixed office of the Druids: “ They
are the ministers o f sacred things; they have the charge o f sacrifices, both public and private ; they give directions for the ordinances of religious worship (religiones interpretantur). A great number of young men resort to them for the purpose of instruction in their system, and they are held in the highest reverence. For it is they who determine most disputes, whether of the affairs of the state or of individuals: and if any crime has been committed, if a man has been slain, if there is a contest concerning an inheritance or the boundaries of their lands, it is the Druids who settle the matter: they fix rewards and punishments : if any one, whether in an individual or public capacity, refuses to abide by their sentence, they forbid him to come to the sacrifices. This punishment is among them very severe; those on whom this interdict is laid are accounted among the unholy and accursed ; all fly from them, andshun their approach and their conversation, lest they should be injured by their very touch ; they are placed out of the pale of the law, and excluded from all offices of honour.” After noticing that a chief Druid, whose office is for life, presides over the rest, Csesar mentions a remarkable circumstance which at once accounts for the selection of such a spot as Sarum Plain, for the erection of a great national monument, a temple, and a seat of justice :— “ These Druids hold a meeting at a certain time of the year in a consecrated spot in the country of the Carnutes (people in the neighbourhood of Chartres), which country is considered to be in the centre of all Gaul. Hither assemble all from every part who have a litigation, and submit themselves to their determination and sentence.” At
Stonehenge, then, we may place the seat of such an assize. There were roads leading direct over the plain to the great British towns of Winchester and Silchester. Across the plain, at a distance not exceeding twenty miles, was the great temple and Druidical settlement of Avebury. The town and hill-fort of Sarum was close at hand . Over the dry chalky downs, intersected by a few streams easilv forded, mig ht pilgrims resort from all the surrounding The seat of justice which was also the seat of the highest unity, would necessarily be rendered as magnificent
Id accomplish. Stonehenge might be of a later than Avebury, with its mighty circles and long avenues of tu.Iars : but it might also be of the same period,— the one . sned by its vastness, the other by its beauty of proportion, sriee executed in that judgment-seat was, according to     Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography: a reassessment K J Fitzpatrick-Matthews
Unknown Roman bases in westcountry
This does not solve the problem of why the Cosmographer should have seen Isca Dumnoniorum, Exeter, as a point at which to insert a break in his listing. The Peutinger Table may offer a clue: although Britain is severely truncated, with only East Anglia and Kent appearing on the surviving copy, Moridunum and Isca Dumnoniorum are also shown without any intervening south-coast places. It is possible that Isca Dumnoniorum was depicted as prominent in some way, perhaps isolated on a promontory or, as seems more likely, as the gateway to a peninsula (as suggested by Rivet & Smith 1979, 200). In this way the Cosmographer might have decided to break his text at a point which appeared dictated by the geography of the region. He does so further north, where his listing of the Antonine Wall forts occurs ‘where that same Britain is seen to be narrowest from sea to sea’ (ubi et ipsa britania plus angustissima de oceano in oceanum esse dinoscitur 10750 to 10751). Although this was not the primary reason for inserting a break at this latter point, the Cosmographer was clearly sensitive to the depicted shape of the island.

[...] the circle of Darab resembles the Druidical circle of Jersey, although the circle [in Jersey] is very much smaller, and the stones of very inconsiderable dimentsions,—a copy in miniature of such vast works as those of Stonehenge and Avebury. This singular monument, which was found buried under the earth, was removed some fifty years ago [in 1785] by General Conway, to his seat near Henley, the stones being placed in his garden according to the original plan.”  The ‘seat near Henley’ is now a school:Park Place School, Remenham, Henley-on-Thames. The school Web site makes mention of the remains of a druidical temple brought there from Jersey. There are photographs on the Prehistoric Jersey 

shall take this opportunity of mentioning incidentally the other minerals of Great Britain, taken notice of by the antients, either as articles of trade or matters of curiosity.

Tin was not only the first metal in these islands which we read of; but also the greatest object of commerce; and which originally led to the discovery of Great Britain by the Romans.

The mercantile Phoenicians traded to the Scilly islands,
the Cassiterides, or land of tin, from the port of Cadiz, four hundred years before Christ. The Romans, for a considerable time, could not discover the place from whence the former procured
the precious metal. They attempted to detect the trade, by following the course of a Phoenician vessel; but the master, faithful to the interest of his country, voluntarily run his ship ashore in another place; preferring the loss of all, rather than sillier n. foreign nation to become partakers of so profitable a secret. The public immediately compensated Iris loss out of its treasury.

This did but make the Romans more eager for the discovery; and after many trials they succeeded. Publius Crassus (father of Marcus Crassus the Triumvir) who was praetor, and governed Spain for several
years, landed in the Cassiterides, and found the report of their riches verified.
As soon as the Romans made a conquest of the country, they formed in the tin province camps and roads, still visible; and left behind vases, urns,

sepulchres, and money, that exhibit daily proofs of their having been a stationary people in Those parts

”1; and thatDunmoniumextended even to the Belerian promontory, or the Land’s-end;

Intriguingly , the Ravenna Cosmography identifies a major regional Roman-era settlement as

Nemetostatio in central Dumnonia

identified with North Tawton, Devon which would translate from Latin as

'The Outpost of the Sacred Grove"

Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography:  a reassessment K J Fitzpatrick-Matthews

The south-west

The first section of the Ravenna Cosmography to deal with Britain, covering 10546 to 1065, is obscure but nevertheless generally recognised as dealing with south-western England

(Richmond & Crawford 1949, .

Why it should have been separated out by the Cosmographer is not at all clear.

 see it as evidence for a special source covering this area in greater detail than the rest of Britain.  This does not seem a necessary hypothesis for reasons to be given below . Indeed, the words that introduce the next section , ‘Again, next to the aforementioned  civitas Isca Dumnoniorum’ iterum iuxta superscriptam ciuitatem iscadumnamorum , strongly hint that the Cosmographer is looking at the same map as he used as a source for this section . We will see many instances of the Cosmographer duplicating names throughout his text , the most startling being *Moridunum , Sidford ? , which is repeated no less than four times. However, they are not noticeably more common in this section than in those that follow. Had he employed a special and separate source for the south-west, it is difficult to see how he would have integrated the information he derived from it with that he derived from his main source without making many more such duplications. We would on this hypothesis also expect the following long section which covers the province or diocese of Britannia to contain a few names relating to the south-western peninsula which the Cosmographer had not noticed as duplications: we do not find them. Arguments e silentio are never strong; more telling are the duplications within this section that cannot be the result of taking names from two different sources. For instance, the name *(Anti)uesteum appears twice, at 1061 and 1063, in both cases with virtually the same truncation. This truncation may well have occurred if the first three or four letters of the name were written ‘in the sea’ on the Cosmographer’s postulated map source (Rivet &Smith 1979, 198). The same error of reading is extremely unlikely to have occurred as a result of using two separate source documents.

There are thus no compelling reasons to believe that the Cosmographer was using a separate and fuller source for the south-west of Britain than for the remainder of the island. True enough, the density of names in the peninsula is high, but it is also high in Cumbria (1071 to 1076 and 10710 to 10711) and between the Roman walls (10730 to 10747). The contrast is not so much with a low density in the remainder of the province, but with specific areas, such as Wales and East Anglia, very poorly represented.

This does not solve the problem of why the Cosmographer should have seen Isca Dumnoniorum, Exeter, as a point at which to insert a break in his listing. The Peutinger Table may offer a clue: although Britain is severely truncated, with only East Anglia and Kent appearing on the surviving copy, Moridunum and Isca Dumnoniorum are also shown without any intervening south-coast places. It is possible that Isca Dumnoniorum was depicted as prominent in some way, perhaps isolated on a promontory or, as seems more likely, as the gateway to a peninsula (as suggested by Rivet & Smith 1979, 200). In this way the Cosmographer might have decided to break his text at a point which appeared dictated by the geography of the region. He does so further north, where his listing of the Antonine Wall forts occurs ‘where that same Britain is seen to be narrowest from sea to sea’ (ubi et ipsa britania plus angustissima de oceano in oceanum esse dinoscitur 10750 to 10751). Although this was not the primary reason for inserting a break at this latter point, the Cosmographer was clearly sensitive to the depicted shape of the island.

On the other hand, we should perhaps take into account the curious fact that the Civitas Dumnoniorum  , basically the Cornish peninsula west of Exeter) appears to have been a part of Britain virtually unaffected by those changes to élite behaviour usually termed ‘romanisation’. Is it possible that much of it lay outside provincial or diocesan control and that some kind of border was depicted on the Cosmographer’s map source as separating the south-western peninsula from the rest of Britain? In that case, Isca Dumnoniorum may have been prominent as a point of contact between the wilds of the far south-west and the more ‘civilised’ Durotriges (or Durotrages, following RIB 1673: the form of the name is very uncertain according to Rivet & Smith 1979, 352) to the east. Group 1: the Cornish Peninsula V ¶31 in qua britania plurimas fuisse ciuitates et castra legimus ex quibus aliquantas designare uolumus id est:

 Giano Barnstaple ? 10546

 Eltabo River Taw 10546

Elconio River Torridge ? 10547

Nemetotatio North Tawton 10547

Tamaris Launceston ? 10548

Puro coronauis ? 10548

 Pilais ? 10549

Vernilis Liskeard ? 10549

Ardua rauenatone River Dart 10550

Deuionisso Statio ? 10551

deuentia steno Buckfastleigh / Totnes ? 10551/10552

Duriarno Plymouth  10552

Vxelis Barnstaple ? 1061

 Verteuia Land’s End 1061 = 1069

This group appears to take us on a general perambulation of the Cornish Peninsula and adjacent area. *Fl Taua, the second name, is clearly the River Taw (Ekwall 1928, 394; Thomas 1966a, 87; Rivet & Smith 1979, 470). *Nemetostatio is probably the fort at North Tawton, which is in an area where a group of modern names containing the elements Nymet and Nemet are found (Rivet & Smith 1979, 425). The identification of *Fl Conio with Ptolemy’s Κενίωνος ποταμοῦ ἐκβολαί (Geography II.3,3) made by Rivet & Smith (1979, 306) must therefore be questioned as the general progression seems to be from north-east to southwest. It may refer the River Torridge, although this is a Celtic name, derived by Ekwall (1928, 414) from a Brittonic *Torric-, ‘violent, rough’. *Glano should therefore be somewhere in north Devon, perhaps in the vicinity of Barnstaple. Tamaris, the Ταμάρη of Ptolemy (II.3,13), is a site on the River Tamar (Ekwall 1928, 389), perhaps at the crossing at Launceston, not the river itself, as the name recurs in the list of river-names (10748). *Durocornouio and Pilais,

Britannia in the Ravenna Cosmography: a reassessment K J Fitzpatrick-Matthews

If the roman averice was  for goods then shoud I consider minerals and that water transport was essential ,then I could consider two Iscas , Hoazme and Laira .

Tamar Lyhner Plym  For one the recnt calstock roman fort ,where does that fit in with this old literature hmmm ,another real consideration would be the waterways bear now no resemblance to "2000 yrs ago, cannot now be identified. Charles Thomas originally identified the former with The Rumps, a pre-Roman defended enclosure. More recently, he suggested that it might be Tintagel, the site of an important sub-Roman trading settlement, although its Romano-British status is not clear (Harry & Morris 1997, 121). <Vernilis> may be the same as Ptolemy’s Οὐολίβα (Geography II.3,13), perhaps near Liskeard (Strang 1997, 30); the correct RomanoBritish form may have been *Verleua. The Cosmographer’s form would have arisen by way of a transposition of -l- and -u-, the latter being miscopied as -n-.

The next name must be for *Fl Deruentione, the River Dart, so the Cosmographer’s eye may have moved from travelling along the spine of Cornwall, following the poorly known road along the centre of the peninsula, and he has possibly now turned his attention to the road south from Exeter, closer to the south Devon coast. Deuionisso Statio and *Deruentio Statio (which are wrongly divided in the text) are probably unlocated Roman government establishments, perhaps tax offices. The latter may have lain in the Dart valley (Dart being Brittonic *Deruentiu: Ekwall 1928, 114), perhaps at Buckfastleigh or Totnes, and the former perhaps near Newton Abbot or elsewhere on the River Teign. The next name, Duriarno, is probably not the same as Durnouaria (Dorchester), as suggested by Rivet & Smith (1979, 345) following Horsley (1732, 490), since it is probably not corrupt (compare the Arnodurum quoted by Williams (Richmond & Crawford 1949, 32), which shows the more usual ‘continental’ ordering of elements). Instead, it may be the name of a site in the vicinity of Plymouth where the inhumation cemetery at Mount Batten and a sequence of coins attest a settlement of some importance (Thomas 1966a, 86). Uxelis is too far west to be the same as Ptolemy’s Οὔξελλα (II.3, 13), which must be on the River Parrett, his Οὐεξάλλα εἴσχυσις (II.3,2), and may be a site or river in Cornwall, perhaps the Fowey or the Fal, unless it is an example of a name written to the west of its symbol on the map source. If this is the case, then it may have been near Barnstaple (Strang 1997, 30).

Group 2: the south Devon and Cornish coast  Melamoni Sidford ? 1062 = 1064/1069/10613

 Scadumnamorum Exeter 1062

 Termonin ? 1063

 Mesteuia Land’s End 1063 = 1061

The mention of Moridunum, Sidford ?, for the first time indicates a change of direction, and there are now hints of an ordering of names with a general progression from east to west. The -l- for -r- in Moridunum is also found in the next section; it may be that the name was very difficult to read in the Cosmographer’s source. It is unlikely to have occurred as a result of misreading two separate documents, further evidence for the essential unity of the Cosmographer’s sources. The unlocated *Terminum would have been somewhere between Exeter and Land’s End, an admittedly imprecise location. The River Gowy in Cheshire was formerly known as the aqua de Tervin (‘water of Tarvin’) in 1209, the name deriving from the Latin terminus, ‘boundary’, via Welsh Terfyn (Dodgson 1970, 26), which has been retained by a large parish and village. Although the origin of the latter name is generally sought in the post-Roman politics of the region (Bu’Lock 1972, 24), it is probable that the River Gowy was the eastern boundary of the prata legionis of the fortress at Chester. Could a similar origin be suggested for this name, at the western boundary of the prata legionis of the early fortress at Exeter or the territorium of the later capital of the Civitas Dumnoniorum?

Group 3: Somerset ?  Milidunum Sidford ? 1064=1062/1069/10619

 Apaunaris Bath ? 1064

 Masona Camerton? 1065

 Alouergium Shepton Mallett 1065

The Cosmographer returns to Moridunum, with the same peculiar -l- for -r- as in the previous group, and a similarly logical ordering of names (this time jumping north-eastward and then working back to the starting-point). Rivet & Smith (1979, 255) identify Apaunaris with Aquae Sulis, Bath, perhaps correctly, so the two remaining names may relate to sites between Bath and Sidford. <Masona> suggests a name derived from that of a river, although which cannot now be ascertained; it perhaps refers to the small town at Camerton. The name is corrupt. *Alobergium should be in a hilly location, probably near the Mendip Hills at Shepton Mallett, where parts of a Romano-British small town have recently been identified.

The Bishop of Sherborne

is an episcopal title which takes its name after the market town of Sherborne in Dorset, England. The title was first used by the Anglo-Saxons between the 8th and 11th centuries. It is now used by the Church of England for a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Salisbury.

Diocesan Bishops of Sherborne

The Anglo-Saxon Diocese of Sherborne was established by Saint Aldhelm in about 705 and comprised the counties of Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and Cornwall. The diocese lost territory on the creation of the bishopric of Cornwall in the early 9th century, and lost further territory on the creation of the bishoprics of Wells and Crediton by Archbishop Plegmund in 909. In 1058, the Sherborne chapter elected Bishop Herman of Ramsbury as their own bishop. He had previously complained of the poverty of his diocese to the extent that, when his plan to become abbot of Malmesbury was blocked by Earl Godwin in 1055, he had abandoned his duties and left to become a monk at St Bertin in France. Following the Norman conquest, the 1075 Council of London united his two sees as a single diocese and translated them to the then-larger settlement around the royal castle at Salisbury (Old Sarum). With papal approval, this was later removed to New Sarum (modern Salisbury) in the 1220's. From Until Incumbent Notes circa 705 709 Saint Aldhelm Also Abbot of Malmesbury. 709 737?; Forthhere Also recorded as Fordhere. Possibly resigned the see in 737. ; 736 766 x 774 Herewald 766 x 774 789 x 794 Æthelmod 793 796 x 801 Denefrith 793 x 801 816 x 825 Wigberht Also recorded as Wigheorht. 816 x 825 867 Eahlstan Also recorded as Alfstan. 867 or 868 871 Saint Heahmund Also recorded as Saint Hamund. 871 x 877 879 x 889 Æthelheah 879 x 889 890 x 900 Wulfsige I 890 x 900 909 Asser Also recorded as John Asser or Asserius Menevensis. c. 909 c. 909 Æthelweard

c. 909 918, or 909 x 925 Wærstan

918, or 909 x 925 918, or 909 x 925 Æthelbald

918, or 909 x 925 932 x 934 Sigehelm

932 x 934 939 x 943 Alfred

939 x 943 958 x 964 Wulfsige II

958 x 964 978 Ælfwold I

978 or 979 991 x 993 Æthelsige I

993? 1002 Wulfsige III Died in office on 8 January 1002.

1002 1011 or 1012 Æthelric

1011 or 1012 c. 1014 Æthelsige II

1014 x 1017 1014 x 1017 Brithwine I

1017 1023 Ælfmaer Abbot of St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury. Died in office, possibly on 5 April 1023.

1023 1045 Brihtwine II Died in office, possibly on 2 June 1045.

1045 1058 Saint Ælfwold II Venerated as a saint with his Feast day on 25 March.

1058 1075 Herman Also Bishop of Ramsbury. Became the first Bishop of Salisbury when the sees of Sherborne and Ramsbury were transferred to Salisbury (Old Sarum) in 1075.

Source(s):[1][2]

Suffragan Bishops of Sherborne[edit]

Anglicanism portal

In 1925, the title Bishop of Sherborne was revived by the Church of England as a suffragan bishopric in the Diocese of Salisbury. From 1981 to 2009, the suffragan Bishop of Sherborne was responsible as area bishop for those parishes in Dorset and Devon belonging to the diocese.[3][4] Since 2009, the suffragan Bishop of Sherborne, along with the suffragan Bishop of Ramsbury, assists the diocesan Bishop of Salisbury in overseeing the whole of the diocese.[3]

The post became vacant in 2015 on the resignation of Graham Kings, who had been consecrated in a special service at Westminster Abbey on 24 June 2009 by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.[5][6]

List of Suffragan Bishops of Sherborne

From Until Incumbent Notes

1925 1927 Robert Abbott

1928 1936 Gerald Allen Translated to Dorchester.

1936 1947 Harold Rodgers

Just two small objects from the Neolithic period are all that have been found from that era in the Yeovil area -a leaf-shaped arrowhead and part of a polished stone axe head. These were discovered close to the Hundred Stone which lies on the ridgeway to the north of the town. This is believed to be a section of the great prehistoric highway, known as the ‘Harroway’ or ‘Hoarway’, stretching from Kent to Cornwall and certainly an arterial way of the Bronze Age. An intriguing discovery, made in 1826 in a quarry near the present Yeovil Junction railway station, did not find its way into print until 1853. It was then stated that a human skeleton had been found in a sitting position in a stone vault cut into solid rock and covered with a rough stone slab. On one side of the figure was an early Bronze Age beaker six and seven-eighths inches (175mm) high, and on the other side a deer’s horn. Nearby, another chamber contained the skeleton of a horse, while yet another, larger, vault contained ‘an immense quantity of human bones with earth and stones’. It is obvious that these interments followed a local battle in which a leader met his death with many of his followers. On the Dorchester Road a Bronze Age burial was uncovered in 1926, when road widening was in progress close to where the road leads to East Coker. A rotary, or ‘beehive’, quern for grinding grain, was recovered from the excavations made to construct a garage in Goldcroft, and 1988 a bronze axehead was unearthed on Wyndham Hill. Perhaps the most important find from this period occurred in 1909 when a gold torc (illustrated above) was found when digging a garden on Hendford Hill. Weighing 5oz 7½ dwt. troy, and with a three-inch (77mm) diameter, it is constructed of composite gold strips and dates from the Middle Bronze Age

Definition of medieval

The adjective medieval literally means “of the Middle Ages,” i.e., the period between antiquity (the Roman world) and the early modern era 

Common chronological range

Historians most often treat the Middle Ages as roughly the 5th century to the 15th century: from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (commonly dated 476) up to the Renaissance and early modern transitions around 1400–1500 

Standard subperiods and their usual dates

• Early Middle Ages: about 500–1000.
• High Middle Ages: about 1000–1300.
• Late Middle Ages: about 1300–1500.
  These are conventional labels; exact boundaries vary by region and by the historian’s focus 

What authors usually mean when they write “medieval”

• Broad cultural sense: the social, political, religious, and material world shaped by feudal institutions, Christendom, and post‑Roman societies in Europe between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance 
• In specialised works an author may narrow the term (for example, “medieval urban law” might mean 1100–1400), so check the author’s period definition in introductions or captions 

Origin and first use of the word

The English term derives from Latin medium aevum “middle age.” The modern English adjective (often spelled mediaeval earlier) was coined in the 19th century from that Latin phrase; recorded modern forms date from the early 1800s (commonly cited 1825 for the form medieval/mediaeval) 

Quick guidance for reading historical scripts

When you encounter “medieval” in a text, assume 5th–15th centuries unless the author states otherwise; for precise work always look for the author’s explicit chronological scope because usages and boundary years differ by topic and region 

Bronze Age time boundaries overview

The Bronze Age is a cultural-technical phase defined by the pervasive use of bronze (an alloy of copper with tin or arsenic), alongside associated changes in technology, trade, burial practice, and social organisation. Its absolute dates vary widely by region because metallurgy and associated cultural changes spread at different times. Below are commonly used regional ranges and practical guidance for tagging or labelling gazetteer entries.

Common regional date ranges

• Near East and Anatolia
  Early Bronze Age: c. 3300–2100 BCE; Middle Bronze Age: c. 2100–1600 BCE; Late Bronze Age: c. 1600–1200 BCE.
• Aegean (Greece and Cyclades)
  Early Bronze Age: c. 3000–2000 BCE; Middle Bronze Age: c. 2000–1600 BCE; Late Bronze Age: c. 1600–1100 BCE.
• Central and Western Europe
  Broad Bronze Age: c. 2300–800 BCE; subdivided (Early/Middle/Late) roughly as Early c. 2300–1500 BCE, Middle c. 1500–1200 BCE, Late c. 1200–800 BCE.
• British Isles (including Devon and Cornwall)
  Broad Bronze Age: c. 2500–800 BCE; Early Bronze Age often starts c. 2500–2000 BCE (after Late Neolithic/Beaker horizons), Late Bronze Age ends c. 800 BCE.
• South Asia (Indian subcontinent)
  Indus-related Bronze Age/Harappan: c. 3300–1300 BCE (mature Harappan c. 2600–1900 BCE); local Bronze-using traditions continue and overlap with early Iron use.
• East Asia
  Bronze Age in China: roughly c. 2000–771 BCE (Xia-Shang-Zhou sequences; Shang c. 1600–1046 BCE is strongly bronze-rich).
• The Americas and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa
  No true widespread Bronze Age phase comparable to Old World sequences; metallurgy often appears much later and in different forms.

Practical guidance for mapping and gazetteer work

• Use region-specific ranges rather than a single global boundary.
• For ambiguous or single-site reports, prefer relative labels: Early Bronze Age, Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age, or Bronze Age (broad)with a numeric range (e.g., Bronze Age c. 2500–800 BCE).
• Where chronology is uncertain, record both: cultural label(Bronze Age) and confidence/precision(e.g., high if radiocarbon dated; low if typological only).
• Include key local markers in metadata: metallurgy present; Beaker/urnfield/bronze-ritual features; radiocarbon dates range; typology links.
• Allow fields for overlapping phases (e.g., “Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age transitional”) and for caveats like reuse or later disturbance.

Why ranges differ and how to communicate that

• Start and end dates depend on: first local alloy production; availability of tin or copper sources and trade; cultural adoption of bronze technologies; and the arrival of ironworking.
• Use wording that communicates variability: “Bronze Age (regional: c. 2500–800 BCE)”or “Bronze Age — British Isles convention: c. 2500–800 BCE”.
• When precision matters, attach dating evidence: radiocarbon ranges, stratigraphic context, or diagnostic artefact types.

Short recommended labels for database fields

• Period label: Bronze Age
• Region qualifier: e.g., British Isles
• Numeric range: e.g., c. 2500–800 BCE
• Subdivision: Early / Middle / Late (if known)
• Dating confidence: High / Medium / Low
• Dating evidence: Radiocarbon; typology; stratigraphy; historical reference

The suffix ‘ton’ constitutes a sort of test word,” says Mr. Isaac Taylor, “ by which we are able to discriminate the Anglo-Saxon settlements.”1 “A tun or ‘ton ’ was a place
surrounded by a hedge, or rudely fortified by a palisade”

The passage you quoted is part of the author’s argument that Plympton’s name is unmistakably Anglo‑Saxon, and that the key to recognising this lies in the suffix ‑ton. The PDF you have open confirms this discussion in its treatment of early Plympton history .

🏰 What ‑tonActually Signifies

The core point is that ‑ton(Old English tūn) originally meant:

• An enclosed place— literally a fenced or hedged area

• A defended homestead or settlement— often with a palisade

• A farmstead that could grow into a village or manor

So when you see a place‑name ending in ‑ton, you are almost always looking at:

• A Saxon foundation, or

• A Saxon renamingof an older site they took over.

This is why Isaac Taylor calls it a “test word”: it reliably marks Anglo‑Saxon occupation or administrative control.