Centuries passed, and the hilltop apparently was given over to solitude, and nature buried these relics of a desperate day under moss and grass. Whether, as sometimes has been supposed, the Romans at a later age stormed a British camp on this height, is at least uncertain. The only things Roman ever found here were some coins, and they may well have belonged to the Romanised Britons who, after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons of Britain, fell a prey to the more virile barbarians from the north of Europe, and retreated before them, being driven mercilessly from one fortified post to another, and slain in many thousands. The last great struggle in Worlebury took place at this period. Arthur, the half-legendary King Arthur of so many romances, the great warrior-king of more than three hundred years earlier date than Alfred the Great, had been at length slain, in A.D. 542; and the Saxon onset, checked by his successes, was renewed. Ceawlin, the great Bretwalda of the powerful and rapidly growing kingdom of Wessex, overthrew the Britons at the bloody battle of Barbury Hill, near Swindon, in A.D. 556, and in A.D. 577, with great slaughter, gained the battle of Dyrham, between Bath and Bristol; all those parts we now know as Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, together with parts of Somerset, being thereby added to the kingdom of Wessex. Soon after the battle of Dyrham, Ceawlin captured Worlebury, where the Britons had taken refuge, and the evidence of what was then wrought here was still visible in 1851, when archæologists systematically excavated and examined the turf that covered the ancient pit-dwellings. In one pit were found three skeletons, doubled up and lying across one another, evidently just as they had been flung there after the fierce onset of the storming party. The skull of one was cleanly gashed in two places, as though by a sword; doubtless in this case the “saexe,” the short sword the Saxons used, and from which, indeed, their name derives. Another had a wound in the thigh and an iron spear-head was found embedded in the spine. Evidently this was the framework of a warrior who had been taken in the rear while engaging in executing a strategical retreat; or, as we used to say at school, “doing a bunk.” Unfortunately he had not started early enough. The third skeleton was that of a bolder man of war, who had stayed to see it out and scorned to run, with the result that he received a huge stone in the skull, and his collarbone was driven up into his jaw. It was then too late to leave, and in fact his bones remained here for close upon thirteen hundred years, with these evidences of his ill-advised stand, plain to see. But his soul goes marching on.