Let us imagine then what kind of country this was in the time of the
ancient Britains, by the nature of the soil, which is a soure,
woodsere land, very natural for the production of oaks especially;
one may conclude, that this North-Division was a shady, dismal wood;
and the inhabitants almost as salvage as the beasts, whose skins were
their only raiment. The language, British (which for the honour of it,
was in those days spoken from the Orcades to Italy and Spain). The
boats on the Avon (which signifies river) were baskets of twigs
covered with an ox-skin, which the poor people in Wales use to this
day, and call them curricles.
Within this shire I believe that there were several Reguli, which
often made war upon one another, and the great ditches which run on
the plains and elsewhere so many miles, were (not unlikely) their
boundaries, and withall served for defence against the incursion of
their enemies, as the Picts' Wall, Offa's Ditch, and that in China; to
compare small things to great. Their religion is at large described by
Csesar; their priests were the Druids. Some of their temples I pretend
to have restored; as Anbury, Stonehenge, &c., as also British
sepulchres. Their way of fighting is livelily set down by Caesar. Their
camps, with those of their antagonists, I have set down in another
place. They knew the use of iron; and about Hedington fields, Bromham,
Bowdon, &c. are still ploughed up cinders (i. e. the scoria of melted
iron). They were two or three degrees I suppose less salvage than the
Americans. Till King John's time wolves were in this island; and in
our grandfathers' days more foxes than now, and marterns (a beast of
brown rich furr) at Stanton Park, &c. the race now extinct thereabout.
The Romans subdued and civilized them; at Lekham (Mr. Camden saith)
was a colony of them, as appears there by the Roman coin found there.
About 1654, in Weekfield, in the parish of Hedington, digging up the
ground deeper than the plough went, they found, for a great way
together, foundations of houses, hearths, coals, and a great deal of
Roman coin, silver and brass, whereof I had a pint; some little
copper-pieces, no bigger than silver half-pence (quaere if they were
not the Roman Denarii) I have portrayed the pot in which a good deal
was found, which pot I presented to the Royal Society's Repository, it
resembles an apprentice's earthen Christmas-box.
At Sherston, hath several times been found Roman money in ploughing. I
have one silver piece found there (1653) not long since, of
Constantine the Great. Among other arts, that of architecture was
introduced by them; and no doubt but here, as well as in other parts,
were then good buildings, here being so good stone: I know not any
vestigia now left in this country, except the fragments of the Castle
of Salisbury, which takes its name from Caesar, Caesarisburghum, from
whence Sarisburgh, whence Salisbury.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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