It has the
population of a Saxon county. Viewed from the massive bridge, with
the church-tower rising above an expanse of sightly buildings, it
possesses the least possible resemblance to the cluster of wattled
huts that may be presumed to have sheltered Egbert and his peers.
[Illustration: PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.]
A more solid memento of the Saxons is preserved in the King's
Stone. This has been of late years set up in the centre of the town,
surrounded with an iron railing, and made visible to all comers,
skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits it with having been that
upon which the kings of Wessex were crowned, as those of Scotland down
to Longshanks, and after him the English, were on the red sandstone
palladium of Scone. From the list of ante-Norman monarchs said to
have received the sceptre upon it the poetically inclined visitor will
select for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation was celebrated in
great state in his seventeenth year. How he fell in love with and
married secretly his cousin Elgiva; how Saint Dunstan and his equally
saintly though not regularly beatified ally, Odo, archbishop of
Canterbury, indignant at a step taken against their fulminations and
protests, and jealous of the fair queen, tore her from his arms, burnt
with hot iron the bloom out of her cheeks, and finally put her
to death with the most cruel tortures; and how her broken-hearted
boy-lord, dethroned and hunted, died before reaching twenty,--is a
standing dish of the pathetic.
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