Again, when the plough struck on a stone coffin in a field remote from any sign of human occupation; and when further search revealed the ruins of a Roman villa, with beautiful pavements still undisturbed, it was possible to guess, from the lettering of the coins which were strewn among broken amphoræ and scraps of Samian, the very year in which the house was last inhabited. Many a hoard of silver pieces has been found among these hills, buried doubtless in some "dark hour of doubt and dread," to wait for better times that never came. Many a time the labourer's spade has clashed on a rusted spear-head, a broken urn, a handful of denarii. At times even on
"A tarnished ring, whose fiery gems,
Still on its circle set,
From the far sands of Indus brought,
Gleam through their setting, rudely wrought,
As if the sky, their hues had caught,
Flamed in their glory yet."
Relics like these—a flint arrowhead, a fragment of pottery, a handful of denarii, a camp, a tumulus—eke out the scanty records of the time, the pages of Asser, the meagre outlines of the Saxon chronicle.
Hardly a point in all the landscape but is linked with some stirring memory. It was on the little island lying off the point here that Githa found refuge after Hastings. Two years later all this shore was ravaged by the sons of Harold; and in the Domesday record, made eighteen years afterwards, we still can trace their handiwork in the lessened values of villages they had plundered. Over and over again after the brief sketch of a hamlet, its list of boors and villeins, its corn and grass land, its mill, its fishpond—perhaps even its patch of vineyard—follow such words as these: "it was worth 100s., now only 60"; or "it was worth four pounds, now only 40 shillings."
In the Armada days—for half a century, indeed, before the sailing of "that great fleet invincible"—there stood, on the high ground across the river, according to a quaint map of the period, "The Coste of England uppon Seuerne," a tower, in which a gun was mounted, as a defence against invasion. Not a stone remains of the tower which in King Harry's time guarded the little port. But all this coast was armed and ready, years before the sailing of the Armada, watching for the red glow on Dawnsboro' that should call up the bold yeomen of the moors to face the "Inquisition dogs, and the devildoms of Spain."