Page:Surrey Archaeological Collections Volume 7.djvu/114

 well as in the specimens of pottery found in the same locality, and on Roker's Farm at Shackleford. But the county of Surrey does not appear to have been held in force by the Romans, and we cannot flatter ourselves that any patrician colonist established a villa like that of Bignor, in or near Peper Harow. We may safely imagine the legions marching along the familiar ridge of the Hog's Back, so admirably constructed by nature for a military road, but the remains of Roman stations hitherto discovered in Surrey are mostly situated on the sandhills which run parallel with the range of chalk downs from east to west. These stations were probably not of primary importance, for the great Roman lines of communication with Sussex and Hampshire are believed to have been carried north of Bagshot and east of Leith Hill, at a distance of more than fifteen miles from Peper Harow. Even the Romans shrunk from crossing the vast and almost impenetrable jungle which then covered the Weald, and contented themselves with driving a single avenue through it by the Stone-street to Chichester. So far as we know, it was the Saxons who first regularly settled themselves in Peper Harow and its neighbourhood, coming hither, as to other parts of England, in the character of intruding immigrants rather than of foreign conquerors. They have left, indeed, no architectural relics of their residence here before the Norman Conquest, unless it be in certain parts of the church at Compton; but we have a cluster of local names, fortified by the conclusive evidence of "Domesday Book," to show how widely the enclosures or townships characteristic of the Saxons were distributed between the Hog's Back and the Wey. On the subject of these local names J speak with great diffidence, having no pretence to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar; but I have submitted two or three of them to my friend Mr. Earle, Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford; and without pledging his great authority to any conjectural explanation, I shall not scruple to avail myself of his suggestions.

Let us first consider the name Peper Harow—the "Pipere-herge" of "Domesday Book," which has