Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/313

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Collectanea.
295

village" (Stanton Harcourt) "told me that a battle was fought there, which the English were very near losing, when the general rode up to one of his captains, named Harcourt, who was in the thick of it, and called out, 'Stan' to un, Harcourt, stan' to un, Harcourt,' and that Harcourt won the battle, and the village has been called Stanton Harcourt ever since."]

Near Enstone is a ruined cromlech known as the "Hoar Stone." The villagers say that "it was put up in memory of a certain general named Hoar, who was slain in the Civil War. It was put there, as that was a piece of land no one owned."[1]

[Near Steeple Barton is another ruined cromlech, also called the "Hoar Stone," which is now only a confused heap of small stones, having been broken up by an ignorant farmer. Some fifty years ago it was much more perfect, and two of the side stones were standing about four feet out of the ground. "They used to say that whenever they tried to drag them two pebbles away with horses, they would roll back of their own accord. Them two pebbles growed out of little uns; at least that's my way of thinking."—(From George Nevill, of Yarnton, aged 74, March, 1901.)]

    neighbourhood. A tumulus close to the "Quoits" was destroyed by the grandfather of the present farmer, and on Stanlake Down many Anglo-Saxon burials have been found.

  1. A letter signed Ζωη in the Oxford Times of March 29, 1902, mentions this story, and adds that "there was a battle over there, Lidstone way." Lidstone being a hamlet of Enstone, about one and a half miles to the north-west. Mr. W. Harper in "Observations on Hoar-Stones," printed in Archaeologia (1832), xxv., 54, speaks of the "War Stone at Enstone. This conspicuous object is said by the country people to have been set up 'at a French wedding.'" There is evidently here a confused version of some legend such as that belonging to the stones at Stanton Drew, Somerset, which were "vulgarly called the Weddings, and they say 'tis a company that assisted at a nuptial ceremony thus petrify'd." Stukeley's Abury, quoted by Evans, Folk-Lore, vi., 31.