various size: these, when considered in connexion with the purposes for which they were raised, become highly interesting. They have relation to the history of Thetford; and as this is glanced at in the poem on Barnham Water, we shall mention very briefly a few relative, and to our purpose requisite, circumstances.
Thetford is a town of great antiquity, but has undergone considerable alterations at different periods, and at this time exhibits but little of its former greatness. It is supposed to have been of importance before the Roman invasion, and at that era it was probably situated entirely on the Suffolk side of the river Ouse, though it is now principally in Norfolk. The Romans strengthened and fortified this place for their own security: from them it passed to the Saxons, and afterwards to the Danes, who, in the year 871, under Inguar their leader, defeated and put to death Edmund, the last of the East-Anglian kings: they also destroyed the town, and massacred its inhabitants. The bodies of those who were slain in this dreadful and decisive conflict, were interred under the tumuli already mentioned. Castle Hill, and its appurtenances, which Bloomfield calls the Danish Mounds, were raised by the Danes
