s others which had then disappeared. It is therefore
difficult to say whether the low here was a prehistoric tumulus or a
battle mound."

Dr. Langford, in his "Staffordshire and Warwickshire" (p. 177), writing
less than forty years ago, says that "a large number of tumuli exist near
Wednesfield"; but the utilitarianism of the farmer and the miner would
make it difficult to find many of these grass-crowned records on the
Willenhall side of the battleground now. Dr. Windle, in his able work,
"Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England" (published in 1904) gives a
list of existing Barrows and Burial-mounds in this country, including
some nine or ten in Staffordshire, but makes no mention of Wednesfield,
Wombourne, or Tettenhall.

[Picture: Decorative flower]

II.--The Saxon Settlement

Fourteen or fifteen centuries ago the cluster of places which we now know
as the town of Wolverhampton, and the numerous industrial centres grouped
around it, were then primitive Saxon settlements, each of them peopled by
the few families that claimed kinship with each other.

These embryo townships were dotted about the clearings which had been
made in the thick primeval forest with which the whole face of England
was then covered, save only where the surface was barren hill or
undrained swamp. Does not the terminal "field," in such a place-name as
Wednesfield, literally mean "feld," or the woodland clearing from which
the timbers had been "felled"? Each settlement, whether called a "ham"
(that is, a home), or a "tun" (otherwise a town), was a
farmer-commonwealth, cultivating the village fields in common; each was
surrounded by a "mark," or belt of waste land, which no man might
appropriate, and no stranger advance across without first blowing his
horn to give timely notice of his approach. Remnants of these open
unappropriated lands may be traced by such place-names as Wednesfield
"Heath," and Monmore "Green."

At the outset each settlement at its foundation was independent of, and
co-equal with, the others; Saxon society being founded on a system of
family groupings, and a government of the ancient patriarchal type.

All questions of government and public interest were settled by the voice
of the people in "moot," or open-air meeting, assembled beneath the
shelter of some convenient tree. Our ancestors were an open-air,
freedom-loving people, who mistrusted walls and contemned fortifications.
In