On the hill-top is Tettenhall Green, where old road and new meet, and so go past a park and hamlet oddly named “The Wergs” to Wrottesley Park, fenced off for the length of a mile by as ugly a stone wall as it would be possible to find in many a long journey. “The Wergs” is a corruption of the ancient name “Witheges,” itself a mangled form of “withy hedges.” It is probable that the name was derived from the sallows with which some early squatter fenced his land, instead of the rude cut-wood fences of primitive times. Wrottesley Hall, burnt in 1896, still lifts its ruined and blackened walls between the trees. Five miles beyond Wolverhampton, passing the “Foaming-Jug” Inn, Staffordshire is left behind, and the borders of Shropshire crossed. XIII Shropshire is the land of the “proud Salopian.” Of what, you may ask, is the Salopian proud? It may be doubted, however, if the phrase really means more than that the Shropshireman has ever been high-spirited, jealous of his own good name, and quick to wrath. But he has good cause for pride in the fair shire that held out of old against the Welsh in the hazardous centuries when this was part of the Marches, the Debatable Land where the frontiers shifted hither and thither as the Lords Marchers or the Welsh chieftains warred with varying fortunes, and where the Englishman often sowed, and raiding Taffy came and reaped unbidden. Shropshire bore its part well in those centuries of strife, when the Welsh were continually striving to get back their own; for it should not be forgotten that this also was Wales in the dim background of history. More than eleven hundred years ago the Englishman threw the Welshman back upon his rugged hills and out of these fertile plains, and this became part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Not only politically a part of that realm, but socially, for war was not an affair of kid gloves in those days, but an affair of race-hatred and extermination, so that when the conquering King Offa had set his rule over what is now Shropshire, those Welshmen who had not fled were slain, and their land occupied by an alien race. So thorough was that change that the very names of the towns and villages were altered, and are either quite forgot or else only survive in the memories of antiquaries. Take a map of England and its neighbouring Wales, and you will find a mysterious earthwork called “Offa’s Dyke,” traced from near Prestatyn, on the Flintshire coast, to Bridge Sollars, on the Wye in Herefordshire. That was the boundary set up by Offa, “the Terrible.” The Shropshire portion of it runs from Chirk, by Llanymynech, Welshpool, Montgomery, and Clun, and to this day not only the place-names, but the people on either side show a distinct cleavage between Saxon and Welsh. In the heart of Shropshire it is difficult to find a trace of the old race. Who but the antiquary knows that before Offa came and seized that town