It has often appeared to the writer to be a really remarkable circumstance, during the long and sometimes acrimonious controversies of the nineteenth century concerning the various physical, social, and ‘technical’ phenomena (methods, etc.) characterizing the Saxon settlement of Britain and its more immediate antecedents, that among the various protagonists of the first rank, none seems to have thought it worth while to visit those lands where an essentially similar environment still prevailed, and to see for himself what they might yield. To make such a statement concerning archaeological students of today would certainly be to invite questions in return, which are not easily answered. What was the (physical) environment of early Saxon England; and where shall we find its ‘essentially similar’ counterpart? But at the time of which I speak, such doubts may almost be said to have been non-existent. Whatever opinions were held concerning Roman centuriation, or Teutonic three-field systems, the old ‘traditional’ view of England as ‘a land of forests’, ‘one great wood’, etc., seems hardly to have been questioned. Under such conditions, virtually any forest country occupied by settlers of European birth or descent would serve the required purpose.