This lecture was written on shipboard in an untidy sea, and, if its matter and its T sentiment pitch and toss a trifle, you may properly expect me, as an archaeologist, to blame environment. I belong in fact to a generation of students who have learned to make something of a fetish of environment, even at the expense of forgetting occasionally the extent to which we are the authors of that same environment. It is not difficult to think of examples where mankind has created a desert and called it civilization; and when in the long run the desert wins, as is its habit, we once again short-circuit logic and arraign environment.

In 1931 I wrote an article maintaining the thesis that Cerdic’s ora, where in 495 Cerdic and in 514 the West Saxons landed, was to be located near Totton at the head of Southampton Water; and that he advanced westwards along an old track called the Cloven Way to Cerdic's ford, which is certainly to be put at Charford on the Salisbury Avon. I still think that the latter part of the advance must have been along the Cloven Way which led to the ford down a deep hollow way that can still be seen. But certain new discoveries have caused me to abandon the theory of a landing at Totton and to locate Cerdic’s ora on the coast between Calshot and the mouth of the Beaulieu River.