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.

These hill villages are hardly large enough to form very good examples of the principle I wish to make clear; namely, that in this district the village has had a tendency, so to speak, to run away from its church. Those of the valley show this tendency better, and we have one instance so striking that I may be allowed to refer to it at length. Two miles up the valley is the large village of Oddington, of which from the railway nothing is to be seen except an old church in a wood, and a large manor-house hard by. If you were to alight here and cross the valley to the church, you would suppose it deserted; and so in fact it is, being now only used for marriages and burials, though it is a large and fine Perpendicular building. The fact is that the village has in this case so completely deserted its church,-I speak of material, not of spiritual things,- and has straggled so far up the slopes above towards its arable land, that a new church has had to be built to suit the altered circumstances. I do not know much of the history of Oddington; but I can have very little doubt that the original ton was where the church is now, or close by it, and that the village remained close at hand until the fifteenth century at least, if one may make a guess based on the style of the architecture of the church. An old man of whom I asked some questions in the churchyard, one day, did in fact tell me that his father, when digging for the squire near the church, came on the foundations of buildings, and that the tradition of the villagers is that their village has changed its position.

Let us now return to Kingham, and see whether the same rule holds good here. I have already said that the church is at the end of the village nearest the river, while the village stretches away from it towards the hill and the arable. Now, I think that Kingham has at one time undergone very much the same change as Oddington, though it has been less complete and revolutionary in our case. An arbitrary lord of the manor might have succeeded, by enclosing land near the church, in driving the village away up the hill, as perhaps he did at Oddington. As it is, the church stands at some little distance from our oldest cottages; and the intermediate space is filled by the present rectory house, with its stables, gar

dens, etc., by the old rectory house with its tithe barn, and by other houses belonging to the glebe or to the family which now represents, if any does, the ancient lords of the manor. The result is at this day that the village has a west end tenanted by the aristocracy, while the "people" have to content themselves with the less sheltered part which is nearer to their work in the fields.

If, then, the cases of Oddington and Kingham are analogous in the main, and if we are satisfied that the original settlement at Oddington was close to the church, we may fairly assume that the same was the case at Kingham. And this is supported, not only by the fact that the position is in every way the best that could have been chosen, but by the very distinct traces of an ancient enclosure, which I am unable to resist the temptation of identifying as that of the original burh, or fortification, of the lord's house, with its yards and buildings. Immediately behind the church is a large field, now generally called the Close, or Closes; and in this field, and enclosing the greater part of it, is a foss about eight feet wide, and varying in depth, rectangular in shape, pretty clearly marked throughout its course, except to the northwest where it abuts on the hollow formed by a little brook now drained, and where, also, it is lost among the farm buildings belonging to the rectory. If we suppose it still complete, it would take in the greater part of the church, which stands almost exactly in the centre of its north-eastern side.*

I should hardly indeed be so ready to identify this ditch as enclosing the nucleus of the original settlement, in spite of its very ancient appearance, if it were not that the ground which it encloses still bears the name of Bury Close. It is indeed only the old men who know this name, and one of them had already corrupted it into Betty Close when he told me of it. Now, such names as Bury Close, Bury Field, Bury Mead, etc., are common enough, not only in our district, but in other parts of the country; and, in all probability, each of them has some

The church itself, if an ancient one (ours is fourteenth century), may be generally taken as marking the site of the original settlement. If not succeeding a heathen temple, it was at least adjacent to the position of the sacred hearth of the lord's house. Gomner, Village Community, pp. 128, seq.