Coming down to comparatively modern times, it is curious that so little notice should have been taken of the White Horse by our antiquaries. Wise, in his Letter to Dr. Mead (1738), which has been already quoted from in the text, regrets this, and then adds: “Leland’s journey does not seem to have carried him this way, nor does Camden here go out of the other’s track; though he mentions, upon another occasion, and by the bye, _The White Horse_; but in such a manner, that I could wish, for his own sake, he had passed it over in silence with the rest. For his own account is altogether so unbecoming so faithful and accurate an author, insinuating to his readers that it has no existence but in the imagination of country people. ‘_The Thames_,’ says he, ‘_falls into a valley, which they call_ The Vale of White Horse, _from I know not what shape of a Horse fancied on the side of a whitish Hill_.’ Much nearer to the truth is Mr. Aubrey, however wide of the mark, who, in the additions to the Britannia, says: ‘I leave others to determine, whether the White Horse on the Hill was made by Hengist, since the Horse was the arms or figure in Hengist’s standard.’ The author of a ‘Tour through England,’ is a little more particular, though he leaves us as much in the dark about the antiquity and design of it. ‘Between this town of Marlborow and Abingdon, is the Vale of White Horse. The inhabitants tell a great many fabulous stories of the original of its name; but there is nothing of foundation in them, that I could find. The whole of the story is this: Looking south from the Vale, we see a trench cut on the side of a high, green hill, in the shape of a horse, and not ill-shaped neither; the trench is about a yard deep, and filled almost up with chalk, so that at a distance you see the exact shape of a White Horse, but so large, as to take up near an acre of ground, some say almost two acres. From this figure, the Hill is called in our maps, White Horse Hill, and the low or flat country under it the Vale of White Horse.’ (See pp. 30, 31.) NOTE II. Medeshamstede, however, was restored with great splendour in the year 963. The account in the Saxon Chronicle is so illustrative of what was going on in England at the time, that I think I may be allowed to give it, especially as the restoration was the work of a Vale of White Horse man, Ethelwold, Abbot of Abingdon, who was in this year made Bishop of Winchester.