Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Welsh in Dorset / by Thomas Kerslake. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![they had taken Sarum. So that until A.D. 658, when they first* entered Somersetshire, by piercing the other chain of hills to our right, this vale must have been at their command. Among the short and compressed notes, of which the earlier pages are made up, of that unique national record the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle, these two occur under the years 552 and 658, as almost all the history of England for those two years. “An. DLii. Now Kynric fought with the Britons at the place that is called Searobyrig [Salisbury] and made them fiy.” “An. DCLViii. Now Kenwalch fought eet Peonnum [at Pointington, north of Sherborne,] with the Welsh and made them fiy as far as the Parret.” Although above a hundred years apart, the relation of these two a.Tmals to each other is almost self-evident: and that during the century which intervened, from the year when the Britons fied to the Parret, a stage farther westward, from the chain of hills to our left, that constitutes the natural division of Dorset and Somerset, the extensive plain which Lies before us was occupied by their West-Saxon invaders. This would be the case at what- ever point of the western hill frontier they may have penetrated Somerset. Some have said this was by way of Penselwood. It has however been shown f that they must have entered the hill- frontier from Gillingham, about where the South-Western Eail- way now enters ; and, having fought the Britons on Pointington Down, drove them along the valley of the Camel and the Yeo, untd this river joins the Parret at Langport. During the same interval, as shown by intermediate annals of the Chronicle, they made other great advances north of Sarum; but our present con_ cern is with this on the west. It is now intended to shew that, when they passed on to the conquest of Somerset, they left that southern hiU district unsubdued: and there is reason to believe * That this was the first occupation of any part of Somerset by the invaders, has already been shown in “ A Primseval British Metropolis,” (Bristol, 1877, pp. 45-57). But as the assertion, that the conquest of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, A.D. 577, included the north part of Somerset, is still persisted in ; a particular examination of Dr. Guest’s topographical suggestions, by which it has been said to be demonstrated, is intended on a future occasion. t Ibid., pp._45, etseq.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22473191_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
