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an examination of this district and its immediate vicinity, may lead to the discovery of but few traces of the ancient inhabitants of the neighbourhood, and their pagan priesthood, and those indications are chiefly to be found in the names of places, many of which have, in the lapse of time, become exceedingly corrupted; still these indicia, scanty as they are, appear to be of sufficient importance to render them worthy the notice of the archaeologist.

Before proceeding to trace out these footprints of a bygone race, it may be useful to consider the probable state of the district before it was inhabited by man, and what were the reasons likely to induce some of the first settlers, who migrated into Surrey from the continent, to select this place as the site of those two or three rude huts which, slowly increasing in number, at length became a village, and then grew into a town. First, then, as to the appearance of the district in its uninhabited state, when the bear and the wolf wandered unmolested by man, around the sources of the Wandel.

The town of Croydon is situate on the verge of the great basin of the London clay; a formation which constitutes the soil of almost all that portion of the