With proffered gifts invites, and tempts their souls to try.[490]
It will be noted that the juge or showman seats himself amid shaws, upon a toothill or barrow, and doubtless just such eager crowds as collected round Æneas gathered in the ancient hippodrome which once occupied the surroundings of St. John’s Church by Aubrey Walk, Kensington. “St John’s Church,” says Mitton, “stands on a hill, once a grassy mound within the hippodrome enclosure, which is marked in a contemporary map ‘Hill for pedestrians,’ apparently a sort of natural grand-stand.”[491] A large tract of this district was formerly covered by a race-course known as the hippodrome. “It stretched,” continues Mitton, “northward in a great ellipse, and then trended north-west and ended up roughly where is now the Triangle at the west-end of St. Quintin Avenue. It was used for both flat-racing and steeplechasing, and the steeplechase course was more than 2 miles in length. The place was very popular being within easy reach of London, but the ground was never very good for the purpose as it was marshy.”[492]
That the grassy mound or natural grand-stand of St. John was once sacred to the divine Ecne, Chinea, or Hackney, and that this King John or King Han was symbolised by an Invictus or prancing courser is implied from the lines of a Bardic poet: “Lo, he is brought from the firm enclosure with his light-coloured bounding steeds—even the sovereign On, the ancient, the generous Feeder”.[493] We have seen that in Ireland Sengann meant Old Gann, and that “Saint” John of Kensington was originally Sinjohn, Holy John, or Elgin, seems to be somewhat further implied from the neighbouring Elgin Crescent, Elgin Avenue, and Howley Street.
The Fulham place almost immediately adjacent, considered in conjunction with Fowell Street, suggests that here, as at the more western Fulham, was a home of Foals or wild Fowl, or perhaps of Fal, the Irish Centaur-god.
The sovereign On, the ancient Courser “of the blushing purple and the potent number,” was mighty Hu, whose name New, or Ancient Yew, is, I think, perpetuated at Newbury—where Hewson is still a family name—at Newington Padox (said to be for paddocks) in Warsickshire, at Newington near Wye, in Kent, and possibly at other Newmarkets or tons, which are intimately associated with horse-racing. With the river Noe in Derbyshire may be connoted Noe, the British form of Noah: The Newburns in Scotland and Northumberland can hardly have been so named because they were novel or new rivers, and in view of the fact that British mythology combined Noah’s ark (Welsh arch) with a mare, it may be questioned whether the place-name Newark (originally Newarcha), really meant as at present supposed New Work.[494] It may be that the Trojan horse story was purely mythological, and had originally relation to the supposition that mankind all emerged from the body of the Solar Horse.
The Kensington Hippodrome was eventually closed down on account of the noise and disorders which arose there, and one may safely assume there was always a certain amount of rudeness and rowdiness among the rout at all hippodromes. Had Herr Cissa, the imaginary Saxon to whom the authorities so generously ascribe Cissbury Ring, Chichester, and many other places, been present on some prehistoric Whit Monday, doubtless like any other personage of importance he would have arrived at Kensington seated in a reidi—the equivalent of the British rhod. And if further, in accordance with Teutonic wont, Cissa had sneered at the shaggy little keffils[495] of the British, certainly some keen Icenian[496] would have pointed out that not only was the keffil or cafall a horse of very distinguished antiquity, but that the word cafall reminded him agreeably of the Gaulish cheval and the Iberian cabal, both very chivalrous or cavalryous old words suggestive of valiant, valid, and strong Che or Jou.
Hereupon some young Cockney would inevitably have uttered the current British byword—
For acuteness and valour the Greeks
For excessive pride the Romans