great Arthur in person. The victory was with the defenders and had the
effect of holding up Cerdic's conquest for a short time. Again some
sort of resistance would seem to have been made before those
mysterious sanctuaries around Avebury and Stonehenge fell to the
Saxon. It is possible that the old holy places of a half-forgotten
faith were again resorted to during the distracting years which
followed the withdrawal of the Roman peace that, during its later
period, had been combined with Christianity. Whatever the cause, it is
certain that something prevented an immediate Saxon advance across the
remote country which eventually became Wiltshire and Dorset. But the
end came with the fall of the great strongholds around Durnovaria
(Dorchester) which took place soon after the Saxon victory at Deorham
in 577, twenty-five years after Old Sarum had capitulated, thus
cutting off from their brothers of the west and north those of the
British who still remained in possession of the coast country between
the inland waters and savage heathlands of East Dorset and the still
wilder country of Exmoor, Dartmoor and Cornwall.

So, by the end of the sixth century, the Kingdom of Wessex was made
more or less an entity, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed race who once
held the country were in the position of a conquered and vassal
people; for the times and the manners of those times well used by
their conquerors, especially in the country of the Dorsaetas, where at
the worst they were treated as useful slaves, and at the best the
masters were but rustic imitators of their forerunners, the Romans. To
the most careless observer a good proportion of the country people of
Dorset are unusually swarthy and "Welsh" in appearance, though of the
handsomer of the two or three distinct races that go to make up that
mixed nation, which has among its divergent types some of the most
primitive, both in a physical and mental sense, in Europe.