ough on
minor heights) as Italy is in the present century. Yet such was
undoubtedly the case in prehistoric times. I know no better instance of
the way these stockaded villages were built than the magnificent group
of antique earthworks in Dorset and Devon which rings round with a
double row of fortresses the beautiful valley of the Axminster Axe.
There, on one side, a long line of strongholds built by the Durotriges
caps every jutting down and hill-top on the southern and eastern bank
of the river, while facing them, on the opposite northern and western
side, rises a similar series of Damnonian fortresses, crowning the
corresponding Devonshire heights. Lambert's Castle, Musberry Castle,
Hawksdown Castle, and so forth, the local nomenclature still calls
them, but they are castles, or _castra_, only in the now obsolete Roman
sense; prehistoric earthworks, with dyke and trench, once stockaded
with wooden palings on top, and enclosing the huts and homes of the
inhabitants. The river ran between the hostile territories; each
village held its own strip of land below its fortress-height, and drove
up its cattle, its women, and its children, in times of foray, to the
safety of the kraal or hill-top encampment.

In such a condition of society, of course, every community was
absolutely dependent upon its own territory for the means of
subsistence. And wherever the means of subsistence existed, a village
was sure to spring up in time upon the nearest hill-top. That is how
the oldest Fiesole of all first came to be perched there. It was a
hill-top refuge for the tillers and grazers of the fertile Arno vale at
its feet.

But why did the people of the Arno Valley fix upon the particular site
of Fiesole? Surely on the southern side of the river, about the Viale
dei Colli, the hills approach much nearer to the plain. From San
Miniato and the Bello Sguardo one looks down far more directly upon the
domes and palaces and campaniles of Florence spread right at one's
feet. Why didn't the primitive inhabitants of the valley fix rather on
a spur of that nearer range--say the one where Galileo's tower
stands--for the site of their village?

If you know Florence and have asked that question within yourself in
all seriousness as you read, I see you haven't yet begun to throw
yourself into the position of affairs in prehistoric Tuscany. You can't
shuffle off your own century. For between the broad plain and the range
of hills where the Viale