ear its own cultivable territory, usually a
broad river-valley, an alluvial plain, a 'carse' or lowland, for
uplands as yet were incapable of tillage by the primitive agriculture
of those early epochs. But it does not stand actually _in_ the carse;
it occupies as a rule the nearest convenient height or hill-top, most
often the one that juts out farthest into the subjacent plain, by way
of security against the attack of enemies. This is the beginning of
almost every great historical European town; it is an arx or acropolis
overhanging its own tilth or _ager_; and though in many cases the town
came down at last into the valley, retaining still its old name, yet
the remains of the old earthworks or walls on the hill-top above often
bear witness to our own day to the original site of the antique
settlement upon the high places.

One can mark, too, various stages in this gradual process of secular
descent from the wind-swept hills into the valleys below, as freer
communications and greater security made access to water, roads, and
rivers of greater importance than mere defence or elevated position. At
Bath, for example, it was the Pax Romana that brought down the town
from the stockaded height of Caer Badon, and the Hill of Solisbury to
the ford and the hot springs in the valley of the Avon. At Old Sarum,
on the other hand, the hill-top town remained much longer: it lived
from the Celtic first into the Roman and then into the West Saxon
world; it had a cathedral of its own in Norman times; and even long
after Bishop Roger Poore founded the New Sarum, which we now call
Salisbury, at the point where the great west road passed the river
below, the hill-top town continued to be inhabited, and, as everybody
knows, when all its population had finally dwindled away, retained some
vestige of its ancient importance by returning a member of its own for
a single farmhouse to the unreformed Parliament till '32. As for
Fiesole, though Florence has long since superseded it as the capital of
the Arno Valley, the town itself still lives on to our own time in a
dead-alive way, and, like Norman. Old Sarum, retains even now its
beautiful old cathedral, its Palazzo Pretorio, and its acknowledged
claims to ancient boroughship. In England, I know by personal
experience only one such hill-top town of the antique sort still
surviving, and that is Shaftsbury; but I am told that Launceston, with
its strong castle overlooking the Tamar, is even a fine