NOTES ON ANCIENT DEFENSIVE EARTHWORKS.
155
Bures, Milton, Maldon, Pleshey, Shoebury, Chipping Ongar
and West Ham. Among the Hertfordshire examples are
Stanstead Mountfitchet and Bishop Stortford.
A singular feature about this list, which is given in the latest
of the papers mentioned (Arch. Journ., Vol. 46. 1889), that
styled "A Contribution to a complete list of Moated Mounds or
Burhs," is that after mentioning Blethebury, Milton, Maldon, Shoe-
bury and West Ham. Mr. Clark adds, "Query, gone," or "Query,
mound," there being apparently no evidence that a mound ever
existed at the places named. On the other hand the mounds at
Stebbing,5 Great Canfield and Rayleigh are not mentioned at all.
However, though I think that the earthworks of Pleshey belong
to the same class as those of Rayleigh, I would not include
either as mere Burhs. Passing over the moundless Burhs
mentioned by Mr. Clark, it appears to me that the defensive
earthworks of Essex and its borders having mounds are divisible
into two classes as distinct as are the Border Castles, such as
Alnwick, Warkworth or Bamborough, from mere Border peel
towers. In the more important class I would group Clare,
Stansted Mountfitchet, Pleshey and Rayleigh ; in the less
important, Bishop Stortford, Chipping Ongar, Mount Bures and
Stebbing. The latter may well have been the mere fortified
centres of Saxon estates, but, as we have seen, the available
evidence tends to show that the former are of earlier date and
occupied positions of much greater importance.
It may probably be urged, ou the other side, that though
much of the earthworks at Norwich, Castle Acre, Thetford and
other places may have been British, yet that the great mound is
a distinctive Saxon feature, and must have been added at a later
date. I have already reminded you that even to the prehistoric
people who made the gigantic mound at Silbury and the smaller
barrows of Salisbury Plain, mound-making was an extremely
familiar operation. Also that if the great mound in defensive
earthworks is a peculiarly Saxon feature, it is an extraordinary
thing that there should exist a popular tradition that the huge
mound at Thetford—a town so prominent in the ninth and tenth
centuries—was the work of the Devil. For I need hardly point
out that such an explanation, wherever it may be met with,
implies that the object to which this origin is imputed is not the
work of the race thus explaining its existence—which in this
case is the Saxon.
5 The Stebbing mound is not mentioned either by Morant or in Murray's Handbook to
Eastern Counties. It is simply a moated mound.