278 ON THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM "SARSEN STONES."
name of Sarsen or Sarcen stones has become applied to the huge
ancient blocks of Stonehenge, Avebury and other primitive stone
monuments because "Sarcen" is simply the old English name of
Saracen, "a name which had already taken this popular form, as
we know from its appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in
days before the Conquest." The name, as attached to
megalithic piles, he continues, is not confined to England :—
" A Breton dolmen bears to this day the name of the Saracen's Oven (Four
du Sarrasin). A similar application of the word Saracen to such monuments has
in fact a wide currency in France. At Forez there is a Roche des Sarrasins.
Near Aries the megalithic galleries or "allees couvertes" are known as prisons or
magasins des Sarrasins."
Mr. Evans gives examples of the connection of Roland with
prehistoric monuments in France and elsewhere on the Mediter-
ranean coast. A dolmen in the eastern Pyrenees is known as the
palet de Roland and a menhir of Correze as the Grave de Roland.
And near Taranto, in southern Italy, is a dolmen locally known
as the "Table of the Paladins" (Tavola dei Paladini).
It can hardly be expected that the word sarsen should be
found in the folk-speech of Essex as it is in that of Wiltshire.
For the sarsen stones of Essex never form conspicuous and
mysterious rude stone monuments as do those of Wiltshire, and
the destruction of individual specimens would consequently
excite little or no local interest. In Essex, also, there would
be much more temptation to break them up into building
material than in the very thinly pastoral district of Salisbury
Plain and Marlborough Downs. The author of Murray's Hand-
booh to the Eastern Counties (2nd ed., 1875) remarks that the
Eastern Counties are at present entirely without rude stone
monuments. It appears, however, that "a circle of stones,
10ft. high was removed from a field at Gorleston, near Yarmouth,
in 1768." But as regards this circle the author of Murray's
Handbook thinks that it was not improbably of Scandinavian
origin, as stone circles were raised in Denmark and Sweden "at
a comparatively late period." But apart from the not improbable
Scandinavian origin of this circle, we should naturally look for
vague traditions of the Saracens not in or towards the east but
the west of Britain, just as we should expect them in Brittany
and the Channel Islands rather than around Calais and
Boulogne. For we must remember that the Saracen corsairs were
little known or dreaded in the Eastern Counties, where the