A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE an unsafe method to determine the conquering tribe by the character of relics found in the graves. To apply this method to a particular case, reasons will presently be given for supposing that West-Saxon influence ceased for some time to be felt in the south-west of the county after the middle of the seventh century ; and the interval of seventy or eighty years does not perhaps allow sufficient time for the recognition of Grimsbury as a frontier town, as well as the subsequent invasion and settlement of a large tract of British territory. On the other hand if, as is likely, the Saxons advanced up the Thames and struck off along the tributary streams, the occupation of the site of Banbury would no doubt have occurred some years before the battle of Bedford ; and Grimsbury may on this supposition have ceased to mark the frontier at that very date. This alternative seems on the whole more probable than that the stronghold separated the Saxon from the Anglian, or the Dane from either, for in both of these cases the dividing line was further to the east. From such a centre as Bicester progress along the Roman road running north-east would have been an easy matter, as that station stood on the northern edge of the Oxford clay. Beyond this however the poverty of a soil on which to this day large tracts of woodland have been allowed to remain may well account for the rarity of Saxon remains in the county between Towcester, Brackley, Buckingham and Stony Stratford. Access to more productive localities was however afforded by the Tove valley and two ancient British trackways, Banbury Lane leading to Hunsbury camp, and the Portway, that ran from Kirtlington along the line of Abes Ditch and due north by Rainsborough camp and Chipping Warden to the neighbourhood of Daventry. And it is no doubt in connection with these tracks that the settlements originated of which the remains can now be traced in the Anglo-Saxon ceme- teries of Marston St. Lawrence, Badby, Newnham and Norton. A comparison of the archsological and geological maps of the county throws a good deal of light on the colonising methods of our Teutonic ancestors, at least in Northamptonshire. Among the numerous sites in the county where settlements existed in Anglo-Saxon times, there is a remarkable uniformity as regards physical conditions. About two-thirds of the total number of such sites are at the junction of the Northampton sand with the upper lias clay which is exposed by the action of running water in the valleys south of the ' Nene fault.' As pointed out in the chapter on the geology of the county, the desirability of a dry site for a dwelling led to the selection of spots on porous soil in the neighbourhood of springs ; and where water could be got by means of shallow wells, groups of dwellings would spring up to develop later into villages and towns. Successive ridges of Northampton sand, from which an abundance of good water is procurable, were thus early occupied along the Nene and Ise, and in many cases the Anglo-Saxon sites adjoin the headwaters of the tributary streams. Such for instance are Brixworth and Pitsford, 226
