in the name. Domesday Book tells us of three Saxon mills driven by this stream, not far from the springs. As copious chalk or green-sand springs never freeze, the water being uniform in temperature, and in winter much above freezing-point, such a pool may well have been associated in the minds of the Wilte settlers with the goddess Hertha.
These old Hertha-names leave but little room for doubt that some of the early settlers in Wiltshire were of Wendish extraction, and this conclusion is supported by other mythological names. Piriun and Pyrgean[1] are ancient place-names of the Anglo-Saxon period in this county, but now lost. Perun was the Wendish name for the god of thunder, the Scandinavian Thor, and the Frisian or Saxon Thunor, and place-names derived from both of these exist. The mythological names attached to the prehistoric dykes of Wiltshire, Wansdyke, Grimsdyke, and Bokerly dyke, tell the same story. Wansdyke, the Wodnesdic of the Saxon age, reminds us of Woden, Grimsditch of the Norse Grim, a Northern name for Woden, and Bokerly dyke, anciently Boggele or Boccoli, reminds us of the circumstance that Boge is the name for a deity in every old Slavonic language or dialect. Another old Wendish name for a god was Kirt, or Krodo, which corresponded to Saturn,[2] and the name Creodan hylle, or hill of Creod, near Ruwanbeorg, Wiltshire, is met with in a charter of Egbert, A.D. 825.[3] One of the most remarkable legends of Rügen is that of the black dog which guards the treasure of an old heathen King in that island,[4] and a legend somewhat similar to this survives in that of the black dog at Winchester.
One of the most remarkable of the Celtic survivals
