The Victoria history of the county of Dorset, England
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Read the Book - Free Download the Book - Free ( 14.5 MB PDF ) VOLUME IIIThe Victoria History of Dorset, Volume II, containing most of the 'general' articles for that county, appeared in 1908. Articles on natural history, pre-history, and schools, and the translation, with commentary, of the county section of Domesday Book then remained to be published in order to complete the 'general' volumes. Though a volume to contain those articles was in preparation at the time, it was not proceeded with, and the First World War put a stop to all further activity on Dorset. An opportunity arose in 1965 to publish separately the Domesday section, which had been prepared for another purpose, and it was decided to do so and not to await the completion of any other 'general' articles. The Royal Commission on Historical Monuments are in any case actively engaged in surveying the county's prehistoric monuments and the case for compiling a partially overlapping survey did not seem compelling. There is, moreover, no strong probability that natural history articles, apart from a survey of physique, will now be needed. They have been omitted from the Victoria History scheme in recent years. It is possible that accounts of ancient endowed grammar schools will in Dorset's case eventually be incorporated in the 'topographical' articles.
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Read the Book - Free Download the Book - Free ( 23.9 MB PDF ) Save for the discovery of that early Christian emblem, the chirho, in a Roman pavement excavated at Frampton there is no evidence to connect Dorset with the early Roman-British church, or any proof that Christianity existed here before the later Roman mission. Nor can the ecclesiastical history of this county be said to commence in the seventh century with the conversion of the West Saxons at the preaching of Birinus their apostle and first bishop, who, on his landing in 635, found the inhabitants of the district 'most pagan' (pagannissimos) according to Bede. Dorset, it should be remembered, formed no integral part of the West Saxon kingdom in which it afterwards became absorbed and no mention of it occurs under the earlier Wessex bishops whose seat was established at Dorchester (Oxford). While discarding an ancient record which names Cenwalch of Wessex, who died in 672, as one of the 'kings, founders of the church of Sherborne,' an early foundation at Wareham may indicate previous fugitive attempts to draw Dorset into the channel of church organization in Wessex as it then existed by establishing a mission centre to its south-east, but it was not until the military subjugation of the county had been completed that it was swept into the main stream of national ecclesiastical life by the establishment of a bishop-stool at Sherborne in 705 on the death of Bishop Haeddi and the division of the West Saxon diocese. |