Tom Browns School Days | Page 6

under in our youth--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country; but a vale--that is, a
flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view if
you choose to turn towards him--that's the essence of a vale. There he is
for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never lose
him as you do in hilly districts.
And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top

of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England,
which wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes,
it's a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch
and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old
rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say
you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land,
some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't
bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls
away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world?
You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is
delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and
here it lies, just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side,
left by her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when
they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their
surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that
you won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy,
as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the
Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind,
and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance,
along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway"
("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the
highest back of the hills--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and
told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he
could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide
there.
And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on
the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for
Englishmen--more sacred than all but one or two fields where their
bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won
his great battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Aescendum" in the
chroniclers), which broke the Danish power, and made England a
Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are
standing--the whole crown of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had
beforehand seized the higher ground," as old Asser says, having wasted
everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst

down on the fair Vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the
heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. "The Christians led
up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot
a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our
very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think
nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it
stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not
three weeks since--an old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At
least, if it isn't the same tree it ought to have been, for it's just in the
place where the battle must have been won or lost--"around which, as I
was saying, the two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge
shout. And in this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of
his earls fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in
the same place." * After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that
there might