adjoining castrum, which, _owing to some sudden panic in the reign of Gratian_, was concealed in the well or fountain dedicated to a local divinity, Conesstina. The Saxon Chronicle, as well as Ethelwerd, as I have already stated, refer to the burying of treasure under similar circumstances. The former says--"This year (A.D. 418) the Romans collected all the treasures that were in Britain, and some they hid in the earth, so that no one has since been able to find them, and some they carried with them into Gaul." Athelstan's connection with Preston and its neighbourhood, at the head of his army, is attested by stronger evidence than mere tradition. In the year 930 he granted the whole of the hundred of Amounderness to the cathedral church at York. He is said to have "_purchased_" the territory with his own money, a somewhat remarkable financial operation for a conquering king in the tenth century, in Anglo-Saxon and Pagan Danish times. But perhaps a previous grant to the church at Ripon influenced him in this matter. In the early part of the seventeenth century lived one William Elston, who, in a MS. entitled, "Mundana Mutabilia, or Ethelestophylax," now in the Harleian collection in the British Museum, placed upon record the following interesting particulars relative to this monarch--"It was once told me by Mr. Alexander Elston, who was uncle to my father and sonne to Ralph Elston, my great grandfather, that the said Ralph Elston had a deede or a copy of a deede in the Saxon tongue, wherein it did appear that king _Ethelstan lying in camp in this county upon occacon of warres_, gave the land of Ethelston vnto one to whom himself was Belsyre." (godfather). The township of Elston, in the parish of Preston, formerly written Ethelstan, is situated on the north bank of the Ribble a little above Cuerdale and Red Scar.