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 A HISTORY OF ESSEX The chambers (which show bands of flints in the chalk walls) are of varying height, the floor of one referred to by Mr. Miller Christy being about 25 feet from the base of the shaft. In some shafts are still traceable ' foot-holes ' formed in the hard sand, by which it may have been easy to descend and ascend with the aid of guide-ropes. Darkness and doubt surround the age and purpose of the deneholes ; those who desire to form an opinion upon these points cannot do better than study the papers above named, but we may briefly say that the Essex Field Club exploration ' has made the post-Neolithic age of the Hangman's Wood pits almost certain.' 1 Pick-marks, evidently made by metal tools, show construction at later date than the stone age, while a somewhat indefinite reference by Mr. R. Meeson 2 suggests the use of one pit for a Roman burial, though this of course would not prove con- struction in Roman times. Of the immense age of the pits there can be no doubt, but to what period they can be assigned is ' not proven.' Space will not allow us to say much as to their possible use. Dr. Plot, writing upon the natural history of Oxfordshire (1705), refers incidentally to these pits as ' the gold mine of Cunobeline in Essex dis- covered again temp. Henry IV.' Absurd as the gold-mine theory is, it was not too absurd for a wild attempt during the ' South Sea Bubble ' (c. 1720) to float a company to rework the pits for gold. Mr. J. G. Waller, 3 Mr. Charles Dawson* and many others consider the pits to have been made simply for the excavation of chalk, a view which is energetically opposed by Messrs. Cole and Holmes. 6 If the primary wish of the excavators was to obtain chalk they knowingly and wilfully concentrated their efforts of every kind so as to ensure the least and worst possible return for their labour a thing which no people, ancient or modern, ever did or will do. Mr. Miller Christy is equally forcible in his remarks 8 : It can hardly be conceived that any community, if wanting chalk, would have dug down through nearly 60 feet of superimposed strata to obtain it, when an unlimited supply could have been obtained actually at the surface within a mile. To suppose any race of people capable of such absurdity is to discredit their sanity. Moreover, if merely chalk pits, why should all the Deneholes have been excavated upon the same symmetrical plan ? And why, above all things, should care have been exercised (as it most clearly had been) to avoid any underground communication between the different pits. Mr. A. R. Goddard 7 suggests the use of the pits as lairs for ambushment or refuge in very early days. Others suggest mining for flints, search for iron pyrites, wells for water, etc., but all of these suggestions are combated in the papers men- tioned, and we feel that the amount of our present information is summed up in the words, ' the hypothesis that the Hangman's Wood Deneholes were mainly used as secret storehouses for grain, furnishes perhaps the 1 Essex NaturaKst, i. 245. * Arch. Journ. xxvi. 191. 3 Reliquary, 1896, p. 36. 4 Geological Mag. 1898, pp. 293, 447. 5 Essex 'Naturalist, i. 251. 6 Reliquary, 1895, p. 80. 7 Essex Arch. Sue. Trans, n.s. vii. 252, 400. 310