The origin of this curious appellation is still to seek. According to some archaeologists it is derived from the prehistoric figure of a giant which was formerly to be seen on the slope, traced there by cutting away the turf along the outline of the shape, such as that still extant near Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire. This, if it ever existed, has long since disappeared. Others consider the name to be a seventeenth century skit on the gigantic height of the hills. Others again see in it a dim traditional recollection of the days when a set of gigantic barbarians really were, for a time, quartered here. This was in the reign of the Roman Emperor Probus (277 A.D.), who leavened his mutinous British forces with prisoners from the Vandal horde lately defeated by the Romans on the Danube. From one such detachment, placed here in garrison, the name of Vandlebury is supposed to have clung ever since to the great earthwork on the summit of the Gog-Magogs. That earthwork, however, is of far older date, being of British, or even earlier, inception. It is a triple ring of gigantic ramparts, like those of Maiden Castle near Dorchester, and nearly a mile in circumference. All is now buried in the shrubberies of Gog-Magog House, the seat successively of Lord Godolphin and of the Dukes of Leeds.[147] But before being thus planted out it must have been one of the most striking examples in the kingdom of such fortifications. Till the eighteenth century it was a favourite scene of bull-baiting and other illegal sports amongst undergraduates, because the bare open country all round made it impossible for the authorities to surprise the offenders. Vandlebury was the original home of the legend, used by Sir Walter Scott in _Marmion_, which told how in the ancient camp, by moonlight, an elfin warrior would answer the challenge of any adventurous knight bold enough to encounter him in single combat. [Footnote 147: It is now the residence of H. Gray Esq. In the stable yard a monument records the celebrated "Godolphin," one of the first Arabs (or, more probably Barbs) to be imported, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, for the improvement of our thoroughbred stock.] In the early decades of the nineteenth century the then Duchess of Leeds here set up for her tenantry one of the earliest rural elementary schools. Children of both sexes were taught in this institution to read and to sew, the boys making their own smock frocks. The boys might, if they would, also learn, as an extra, to write; but not the girls, for Her Grace considered that it would deleteriously affect their prospects in domestic service if they were possessed of the dangerous power of deciphering their employers' correspondence.