Poly-olbion Cant. 3.
Whom for a paltry ditch, when Stonendge pleas’d t’upbraid,
The old man taking heart, thus to that Trophy said;
Dull heap, that thus thy head above the rest doth reare,
Precisely yet not know’st who first did place thee there;
But Traytor basely turn’d to Merlins skill dost flie,
And with his Magicks dost thy Makers truth belie.
For, as for that ridiculous Fable, of Merlins transporting the stones out of Ireland by Magick, it’s an idle conceit. As also, that old wives tale, that for the greatnesse it was in elder times called the Giants dance. The name of the dance of Giants by which it is styled in Monmouth, hath nothing allusive, no not so much as to the tale he tels us, saith a modern Writer in the life of Nero Cæsar.
Furthermore, our modern Historians Stow and Speed,Speed lib. 7.
Stow fo. 58. in 4o. tell us, in severall parts of the Plain adjoyning, have been by digging found, peeces of ancient fashioned armour, and the bones of men, insinuating this as an argument, for upholding the opinions of the British Writers. To which, if they would have those to be the bones of the slaughtered Britans, how came those Armours to be found with them, they coming to the Treaty unarmed, and without weapons? Howsoever, what is done in the Plains abroad, concerns not Stoneheng, Neither can any man think it strange, that in a place, where Fame hath rendred, so many memorable and fierce battels, fought in times of old, rusty armour, and mens bones should be digged up. It is usuall throughout the world in all such places, and (if I mistake not) Sands in his Travels, relates, that even in the Plains of Pharsalia, such like bones and Armour, have lately been discovered: and Sir Henry Blunt in that notable relation of his voyage into the Levant, speaks with much judgement of those Pharsalian fields. Likewise, the aforesaid Writers,Cam. fo. 194. Speed lib. 7. might well have remembred, some of themselves deliver, that at Kambulan, or Cambula in Cornwall, such habiliments of War have been digged up, in tillage of the ground, witnessing either the fatall field, sometimes there fought, where Mordred was slain by Arthur, and Arthur himself received his deaths wound: or else, the reliques of that battel betwixt the Britans and Saxons, in the year eight hundred and twenty. ’Tis true, the relation conduces much towards confirming, that ancient custome of the Saxons, formerly recited out of Leyland, considering especially, not far from this Antiquity, lie certain hillocks, at this day commonly called the seven Burrows, where it may be presumed, some Princes, or Nobles of the Saxon Nation lie interred. But, that Stoneheng should therefore be a place of buriall, the aforesaid relation to maintain the same is nothing worth.
They adde moreover, the stones yet remaining are not to be numbred, according as our Noble Sydney in his Sonnet of the wonders of England.