Dyrham in 577 brought Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath into the hands of the Saxons, and cut off the communication between the Britons of the south-west and those of Wales. Whatever part the Wansdyke, on the hills north of which the battle was fought, may have played during the century before the fight at Dyrham, its history must have closed with Ceawlin’s conquest. The first work of fortification by the Teutonic invaders, of which we have any account, is the royal city of Bebbanburh or Bamburgh in Northumberland, which Ida (547-59), king of Northumbria, called after his wife Bebba. This, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,[25] was first girt by a hedge, and afterwards—probably long after the days of Ida—by a wall. One of the most noble of English castles stands upon the basaltic rock of Bamburgh, and its walls embrace the site of Ida’s capital. But the later stronghold must not be confounded with the earlier. The _burh_ of Ida, which Penda sought to burn in 651,[26] was not the private castle which William Rufus afterwards besieged. The name of Bebbanburh is significant. _Burh_ or _burg_ was a term applied by Saxons to fortified places. Cissbury in Sussex, Badbury and Poundbury in Dorset, Battlesbury and Scratchbury in Wilts, Cadbury, Dolebury, and Worlebury in Somerset, are early camps to which Saxons gave the name of _burh_. Searobyrig, the later Salisbury, was the name given by them to the great fortress of Old Sarum. Peterborough and Bury St Edmunds bear names derived from _burh_ and its dative _byrig_, and were towns enclosed by a rampart.[27] And, although, by a not very satisfactory method of argument, the Saxon _burh_ has been taken very generally as the prototype of the castle, the very cases on which this argument chiefly rests show that the _burh_ was a fortified town, and not the fortress of an individual lord. It is true that, at any rate until the time of Alfred the Great, the word _burh_ implies a fortified house as well as a fortified collection of dwellings; but the _burhs_ of which we read in connection with the Danish wars were towns and villages. The term is equivalent to the Roman _oppidum_, the French _bourg_, or the German _burg_. The first of the Saxon emperors, Henry the Fowler, made the founding of _burhs_ a leading part of his policy:[28] Merseburg, Brandenburg, Würzburg, all bear the familiar suffix. And, had not a later age chosen perversely to call the greatest of our prehistoric camps Maiden Castle, we should have had a Maidenbury of our own to show, far more ancient than the German Magdeburg.[29]