are two little hill towns, which must have served as markets for the neighborhood,― Chipping Norton and Stow-on-theWold, which stand at a height of seven or eight hundred feet above the sea, and are conspicuous afar; but the regular village settlement seems to have been in the valley or just above it, if we are to judge by the prevalence of the terminations usually supposed to indicate it. And this rule holds good for the most part, as far as I can discern, among all the hills and vales of our neighborhood.

One may ask whether these hams and tons - such as Lyneham, Milton, Shipton, Oddington, Bledington, and Kingham, which is the village I am to speak of more particularly were in their origin settlements of the Teutonic invaders of the country, or whether, as Mr. Seebohm suggests, those invaders found here Roman or Celtic settlements and a system of cultivation ready-made for them, to which they adapted themselves. To this question I can give no direct answer. I can only say that I have not been able to find any traces of that continuity of which Mr. Seebohm gives some examples from other parts of the country. We have barrows and round camps on our hills, and the famous Rollerich stones, indicating the presence of pre-Roman inhabitants; and we have also within five miles to the north-west the great Roman road called the Foss Way, which comes across the Cotswolds to Stow-on-the-Wold, and so straight onwards to Coventry and Lincoln. To the south, again, half-way to Oxford, we have the Akeman Street, which crosses the railway near Stonesfield. Here stood a Roman villa, of which one beautiful pavement and other remains are still to be seen; but no village has grown up around it,- even the farm-house near at hand is isolated and modern. So, too, with the famous Chedworth villa on the Foss Way, some fifteen miles to the west of us. It stands, or, rather, stood, quite alone, and was until lately so completely buried as to attract the attention of the great Darwin when he was investigating the power of earthworms to hide ruins out of sight in the course of ages. Two villages near us do indeed bear names which may suggest at least a Roman origin,- Cornwell and Broadwell; and the

latter is quite close to the Foss Way. But, even if we admit that the termination well is here the survival of the Roman villa, I do not see that this gives us any real ground for concluding that our ordinary hams and tons had a pre-Teutonic origin; and the evidence of a chance discovery of a few Roman coins will not carry us much further.*

So, until we have some fresh light on the question, I think we must conclude that Kingham, like most of the villages in our valley, had no existence until the West Saxons came this way. Taking it as a working hypothesis that, when they came, they had to clear the ground for themselves, let us see what kind of a position they chose to settle themselves upon.

Avoiding the low-lying meadows of the Evenlode, they chose a rising ground to the east, which at a few hundred yards from the stream remains pleasantly level for a short distance, and then rises again for a mile or more, until at a height of some seven hundred feet it begins to fall again in what is now the adjoining parish of Cornwell. To the southeast this rising ground is flanked by another series of low meadows, through which runs a smaller stream to join the Evenlode at right angles. But to the north-west there is no such distinct boundary. Here the ground lies fairly level; and you may walk along it over good, sound corn-land to the very end of the parish.†

Whatever race it was that chose this site, it was chosen with a keen eye to its varied advantages. The settlement itself was on the level ground above the angle formed by the junction of the two streams; just below it the smaller of these could be used to turn a mill, as it still does; the land just here is good and wholesome, and drains naturally and easily in

* I can hear of no Roman coins discovered in our parish.

In reproducing the map of the parish of Kingham on the opposite page, it has been found necessary to indicate by initial letters some of the divisions referred to in this article. The letters used are as follows:

both directions. The low-lying meadows are close by, and abundant hay is grown in them; and towards the hill there was such an expanse of eligible land for clearing as made the prosperity of the settlement a certainty. Within some five hundred years the amount under cultivation was not less than a thousand acres, probably more.*

I have said that the original settlement was in this position, because the village is there now. But the village has in course of time grown far beyond its earliest limits, and the question arises whether we can find any data for determining where the nucleus was situated out of which it grew. I think we have some material for making a good guess on this point, and will explain them as clearly as I can, with the help of the map.

It is a characteristic not only of Kingham, but of almost all the villages round us, that the church stands at one extremity, while the houses straggle away in one or two streets towards the cultivated land which before the enclosures was the "open field." In the case of the hams and tons of the valley, the church is usually at the end nearest the river, and the village has grown out in the direction of the slopes where the arable of the farms is for the most part situated; while the hill villages have taken, in some instances at least, an exactly opposite direction. There, whatever may be the case now, the ancient arable was on the slopes below the village; and the cottages accordingly straggle down the hill, as a rule, while the church stands at the top by itself. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that this ancient arable on the slopes has at one time or other been turned into pasture,† and that, although its relation to the village geography is still quite clear to an observant eye, the original condition of things has been almost entirely reversed: the arable is now above the village, on the highest ground, where the light soil and natural drainage offer conveniences which the original settlers presumably failed to discover.‡

In Domesday it is set down as 10 hides; and the normal reckoning is 120 acres to the hide.

†This is proved by the ridges and furrows which are everywhere apparent. The hills were then no doubt used as sheep-runs. Then Idbury (a hill village) in Domesday has a very large extent of pasture for its size: so, too, Fifield.