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.” Bishop Osmund finished his new cathedral in 1092, “and established the new ritual ‘ad usum Sarum.’” The foundations of the cathedral were visible in the very dry summer of 1834. It was in the form of a cross 270 feet long by 70 feet wide, the transept of the same width and 150 feet long. Its plan is remarkable for having a square instead of an apsidal East end, and a Galilee or Atrium at the West end. Within a few days of its consecration a thunderstorm seriously injured the roofs and walls. Robert of Gloucester, alluding to the fifth year of the reign of William II., sings:— “So gret lytnynge was the vyfte yer so that al to noghte The rof of the Chyrch of Salesbury it bronte Rygh even the vyfte day that he y hawled was.”