Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 11.djvu/161

Rh of Edward I., 1279, John Swinburne obtained a fair and market to be held here.

On a fillet on the south side appear to be the following characters. What the first three may mean is doubtful, but the subsequent letters appear to be the word DANEGELT. This term was first applied to a tribute of 30,000, or according to some writers, 36,000 pounds (A. Sax.), raised in the year 1007 during the reign of Ethelred the Unready, to purchase a precarious peace from the Danes. It was also sometimes used to designate taxes imposed on other extraordinary occasions.

On the western side are three figures, which, as Bishop Nicholson says, "evidently enough manifest the monument to be Christian. The highest may be, as the learned prelate suggested, the Blessed Virgin with the Babe in her arms. The next is that of our Saviour with the glory round his head. In a compartment underneath this is the principal inscription, consisting of nine lines; and underneath this is the figure of a man with a bird upon his hand, and in front of him a perch, which, in the absence of a better explanation, may possibly have been intended to represent Odin, or some Danish chieftain, and his dreaded raven: and we may suppose that he was placed at the bottom of the group to typify his conversion and subjection to the Redeemer, who was descended from the Blessed Virgin. The inscription appears to be as follows, so far as I have been able to trace the letters (see woodcut, p. 132). The eighth and ninth lines are quite illegible.

In the first line the three characters at the commencement probably form the monogram I H S, and being placed