A Sentimental and Practical Guide to Amesbury and Stonehenge
Florenace Caroline Mathilde Antrobus
9781465656841
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Lies two miles from Salisbury, and stands up, making a bold outline in the surrounding open country. It is a hill, bare now, save for some trees, encircled with entrenchments, with a central mound peering above them. But centuries ago this spot was crowded with buildings—religious, military, and domestic, and was one of the most important in our island. Some say that the ancient British name was Caer Sarflag, the “City of the Service Tree.” Its Roman name was Sorbiodunun, the SaxonSarobyrig. The face of the hill is smooth and very steep. The summit is fenced by a mighty earthen rampart and ditch, protected by a lower raised bank outside of it, the height from the top of the one to the bottom of the other being 106 feet. The surface of the hill is an elongated circular area of 27½ acres. In the centre of the area is a second circular earthwork and ditch 100 feet high, and within these stood the citadel. On the top of the earthwork surrounding the citadel was a very strong wall 12 feet thick, of flint embedded in rubble, and coated with square stones, of which some portion remain. To the great outer earthwork there were two entrances—one (guarded by a hornwork still remaining) on the western, another (the postern) on the eastern side. The site of the citadel is now overgrown with briers and brushwood; the rest of the area is partly in a state of nature, partly cultivated. “Celt and Roman alike had seen the military value of the height from which the eye sweeps nowadays over the grassy meadows of the Avon to the arrowy spire of Salisbury; and, admirable as the position was in itself, it had been strengthened at a vast cost of labour. The camp on the summit of the knoll was girt in by a trench hewn so deeply in the chalk that, from the inner side of it, the white face of the rampart rose 100 feet high, while strong outworks protected the approaches to the fortress from the west and from the east.” Though there may have been a British stronghold here, still, it is the opinion of good antiquaries that there is now no British work to be seen; that the Romans took possession of the hill and defended it by a simple escarpment, without any ditch, but with outworks at the entrances; and that the ditch now on the face of the scarp, as well as the central citadel and its defences, were added by the Saxons, and perhaps by Alfred, who, in his war with the Danes, certainly paid great attention to strengthening the position. There are Roman roads to Silchester, Winchester, Dorchester, Uphill, on the Bristol Channel, and others, it is believed, to Bath and Marlborough. Cynric the Saxon won a victory over the Britons in 552. In 960, Edgar held his Council here. In 1003, Seweyn and the Danes are said to have stormed it. In the time of the Confessor a monastery of nuns was established. It was not till 1072 that it became the seat of a bishop. The kingdom of Wessex originally formed one diocese, and the see being fixed 683, St. Hædde being bishop, the see was removed to Winchester. In 705, the diocese was divided, a new see for the district of E. Selwood being fixed at Sherborne, whose first bishop was St. Ealdhelm. A further subdivision took place in 909, a new see for Berks and Wilts being created at Ramsbury, which was reunited to Sherborne by Bishop Herman 1045, who in 1072 transferred the see to Old Sarum. In 1070 William the Conqueror, as the closing act of his conquest, reviewed his victorious army on the plain below Old Sarum, where now the modern city stands, rewarding its leaders with lands and gifts. The Castellanship of Sarum he gave to his kinsman, Osmund, who afterwards, taking Holy Orders, succeeded Herman in the see. In 1086 the King assembled here, the year before his death, all the chief landowners of the realm to swear that “whose men soever they were they would be faithful to him against all other men,” by which “England was made ever afterwards an undivided kingdom.”
