somewhere on the heights that overlook the Severn, and not improbably, as Hartshorne has suggested, on the Breidden Hills, at the north-west base of which that river rolls. No other site which we have explored could have shown the 'amnis vado incerto,' the shifting ford, or occasionally difficult fordage, of Tacitus's description; no other site the unbroken retreat to still higher hills which assisted, according to the Roman historian, the Silurian fugitives. But the Breidden Hills are beyond our present boundary. Not so the country around Leintwardine in North Herefordshire, the nurse of a genus acre virûm' laying claim to the possession, not only of warlike mettle, but also of rich and thriving tillage. A glance at its topography, illustrated by traditionary history, would prove that the ancient spirit of its natives outlived the memory of Silurian struggles, and re-enacted gallant fights and defences in later conflicts and epochs. It is certain that the Romans penetrated so far, no less from the traces of their roads than from such names of villages as Walford, on the Teme, betokening their footprints. After the final surrender of Caractacus, there is little or no record of further resistance to the Roman invader in those parts of Britain with which our subject is concerned. The subjugation of the country was completed by Agricola, and the policy of the conquerors taught civilization, agriculture, commerce, and mining operations, instead of arms and ferocity, to the generally disarmed natives; and marks of this are extant on the Gloucestershire border of Herefordshire, in the Roman iron district of the Forest of Dean. In various localities around Goodrich, Whitchurch, Ross, and the Dowards, are traces of ancient Roman iron mines, confirmed by the evidence of immense quantities of iron scoria or 'cinders,' amidst which Roman coins and pottery have been frequently picked up. To these industries was doubtless due the building of the traditional Roman city of Ariconium, long confused with another Roman station at Magna or Kenchester, but now admitted to have stood about three miles from Ross, near Weston-under-Penyard, on the left of the road from Ross to Gloucester, and not far from the old mansion of Bollitree. The site of this Roman town, though at a slight elevation, commands a splendid view eastward over the plains of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, from north to south, as well as the Hill of Penyard and Dean Forest to the west; and though there is no continuous tradition of many Roman relics, there is one of a 'beaten down Roman city,' and of Roman forges and smelting-furnaces, the ashes and cinders of which are still found in quantities just under under the surface. As in the Roman Itineraries the chief road northward along the border began with (Glevum) Gloucester, and coming first to (Ariconium) Weston, went thence to Blestium (Monmouth), and so by Usk and Abergavenny to Herefordshire, Kenchester, and due north to Shrewsbury, so it is probable there was a direct and shorter 'cut,' from Weston to Kenchester under Caplar Hill, and by Fownhope and Mordiford. 'Magna' is perhaps the more notable evidence of the later Roman occupation. Situate some five miles north-west of Hereford, and overlooked by the double-ditched entrenchment and grand outlook (715 feet high) of the British camp of Credenhill, as well as flanked to the west by the classic plantations of Foxley-Kenchester, the Roman Magna, extorts a notice of its still traceable five-sided camp of thirty or forty acres, raised somewhat above the level of the surrounding valley, and having two entrances on the west, and as many on the north. It lies on the great Roman road from Caerleon, through Abergavenny, to Wroxeter or Uriconium, near the Wrekin, which it resembles in form, if not extent. Though not so dug about as Wroxeter, Corinium, or Silchester, still there have been found here, within or adjacent to the boundaries of this station, coins, pottery, herring-bone work cemented with mortar, leaden pipes, portions of a tessellated pavement and a hypocaust, personal ornaments of Roman wear, and, as at Lydney, in Gloucestershire, a Roman oculist's stamp. Another remaining feature in Leland's time was a mass of brickwork, niched or arched, presenting the semblance of a chair, which the folisch people calle the King of feyres' chayre.' This was mischievously undermined and destroyed, in consequence of a wager, some sixty years ago.* Many of the relics found were given by See Brayley and Britton's 'Beauties of England and Wales,' vol. vi. pp. 584–5. It is of the remains of Magna, near Bishopstone, that Wordsworth, a frequent visitor with Southey at Brinsop Court, near Credenhill, wrote 'Fresh and clear, As if its hues were of the passing year, Dawns this time-buried pavement. From that mound Or a fierce impress issues with its foil Of tenderness: the wolf whose suckling twins The unlettered ploughboy pities when he wins Much information about Magna and Ariconium may be derived from a pleasant little book of a quarter of a century ago, Wanderings of an Antiquary,' by the late Thomas Wright, M.A., chapters i. ii. J. B. Nichols and Sons, London, 1853. the the owner of the estate, Mr. Hardwick, to Dean Mereweather, and some are still in the hands of Mr. Hardwick's family. Such then, with the Roman roads which they consolidated and trod, are the chief footprints of the first conquerors of the border-land, now known as Herefordshire. To them, when finally withdrawn early in the fifth century, succeeded in Britain, by the invitation of rulers such as Vortigern, the Saxons -called in at once against domestic and foreign foes. But of any distinct effects of this new rule upon a district so far inland there is scant evidence, at any rate until the later years of the Saxon Heptarchy, although it is probably to the sixth century that we must refer the connection with Herefordshire of the famous Dubricius, archbishop of Caerleon, perhaps as a native. Around Hentland and Llanfrother, between Hereford and Ross, and in the neighbourhood of the Wye, linger very ancient memories of this Saint and Bishop, to whom the old church' (Henllan) was dedicated, where he is said to have founded a college to unteach the Pelagian heresy. A little later he is found higher up the Wye at Mochros, supposed to be the present Moccas. But it is his early career only that affects the 'origines' of Herefordshire, and in particular the district of Erchenfield, where two churches are dedicated to him. A Bishop's See was established at Hereford in 676. It was more than a century later that the county, which had been for one or two generations an independent kingdom, under the brothers of Ethelred of Mercia, was re-united with that sovereignty under the masterful sway of Offa, the vigorous represser of the Welsh, and, what even more closely concerns the history of Saxon Herefordshire, the slayer and supplanter of Ethelbert of East Anglia. Looking across the Lug from Dinmore Hill, which is justly described by Leland as a specula to see all the country about,' southward towards Hereford, over parishes rich in pastures, corn-lands, and orchards unsurpassed in this agricultural and fruit-bearing county, the eye must rest upon successive traditional souvenirs of Ethelbert's murder in the village of Marden, memorable as the burial-place of Ethelbert, and the adjoining encampment of Sutton Walls. Of Marden Church, of Early English architecture, with square tower and spire, it need hardly be said that it cannot pretend to other than legendary association with the church which it was part of Offa's penance for the murder of Ethelbert to build, where his body first found burial, a mile and a half from Sutton. A well, however, at the west end of the nave, defended by circular stonework and ten inches in diameter, encloses, below the pavement, a spring still known as St. Ethelbert's, and said to have sprung up mira culously, culously, where he was first interred. Opposite to this well is a niche in the west wall of the nave, said to have been designed for an effigy of the saint. Of Sutton Walls, a mile or so nearer Hereford, there is a probability that they represent the site of a British, and even afterwards a Roman camp, though the enclosure of thirty acres within an entrenchment, all table-land save one marked depression vulgarly called the 'King's Kitchen,' is now so overgrown with trees and brushwood at the bases, where alone it can be properly studied, that one would be loth to avouch the four entrances of a Roman camp. Far more certain are the tokens of a Saxon mound, at the end of the walls next Marden, and overlooking the road to Hereford; and hereabouts, in the town to the south of the Roman camp, was the palace of Offa at Sutton, where Ethelbert was murdered, and by his death contributed to the rise of Hereford Cathedral. The tale is told by chroniclers with divers variations touching the manner and the perpetrator of the murder; but as Öffa overran and annexed the kingdom of Ethelbert shortly after it, little heed need be given to those who saddle the sin on his queen Quendreda. Offa's penance seems to acknowledge his personal guilt, which was purged by the translation of the saint's remains to Hereford, where a minster was dedicated to him, and enriched by the offerings of Offa and his successor, the Peter's pence of their subjects, and the gifts of pilgrims to the martyr's shrine. The history of Marden as well as of Sutton in later times is neither inconspicuous nor unprofitable, as may be gathered from the ancient families connected with them; but the chief interest of both centres in Ethelbert and Offa, whose dyke passes six miles off to the west; and a charter of his successor in 799 mentions Hereford Cathedral. Sutton continued a Mercian palace till the union of the seven kingdoms in 827. Of the famous dyke, called by the Welsh Clawdd Offa,' it will suffice to say that it stretched, as a line of demarcation not to be transgressed on penalty of mutilation, from near Chepstow on the Severn estuary, to Basingwerk on that of the Dee, a military border drawn from the mouth of the Wye to the coast of Flintshire. Offa of Mercia died in A.D. 794, but traces of this, his work, survive in various parts of the county of Hereford, as at Moorhampton, beyond Credenhill; near Lyonshall, further to the north-west; at Herrock, beyond Kington; and at Evancoed and elsewhere, in the adjoining county of Radnor. To the assumption that it offered an impassable barrier to the irrepressible Welshman, history gives a persistent negative, seeing that as late as 1055 and in the reign of Edward Edward the Confessor, Elfgar, the son of Leofric and Earl of the East Angles, being banished by the King, and having placed himself at the head of a force of Irish Danes, allied himself with Gruffydd, king of South Wales, and with him and his Welshmen entered the southern side of the county, and the district known as Archenfield; harried it with fire and sword; and, after defeating the royal forces in the field, some two miles from Hereford, through the cowardice or misjudgment of their commander, Ralph the Earl, penetrated to Hereford, burnt the city and minster, and slew seven of its canons at the very gates of the sanctuary. The aged prelate who had rebuilt the minster thus destroyed, Bishop Æthelstan, was non-resident, owing to blindness; but his locum tenens, a Welsh Bishop, by name Tremerin, succumbed within the twelvemonth to this terrible blow. The more militant priest, who was called to fill the see, Leofgar, a chaplain of the famous Earl Harold, sped little the better for girding himself with carnal weapons, and fell in battle against the Welsh the next year, along with Elfnoth, the shirereeve, and many good men. So much for the insecurity of the peace of this shire, arising at this period from the constant inroads of the Welsh, which made more than one prelate fain to prefer his summer palace at Bosbury (near Ledbury) to his more danger-fraught metropolis. The result of this Welsh inroad was the appointment of Earl Harold to the defence of the county and city and the chastisement of the rebels; and whether one of his immediate works was, or was not, to fortify the city with masonry and to rebuild the castle in a more solid fashion than a mound and dyke, there is reason for supposing that he did so at a later date. Mr. Freeman inclines to the conjecture that the fort or citadel of Hereford, destroyed in the general wreck by Gruffydd, was a Norman castle, such as had already its type in the stronghold of Earl Ralph's comrade in arms, at Richard's Castle, especially as it does not figure among the mounds, burgs, and kindred fortresses, which were raised in the Saxon or English period by Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd. Of these there are numerous examples in Herefordshire, as might have been expected from its exposure to Danes and Welshmen. Such was probably the primitive appearance of the subsequent Norman castle of Wigmore, above the church and town of that name, and possessing an outlook in keeping with its importance in Herefordshire history. Here, on the eastern verge of a ravine, severing the east of the ridge from the higher and broader * See Freeman's 'Norman Conquest,' vol. ii. pp. 385-95. ground |