The Saxon village, viewed from a distance and a certain height, would have been something more familiar to you as a "village" than Axl and Beatrice's warren. For one thing -- perhaps because the Saxons had a keener sense of claustrophobia -- there was none of this digging into the hillside. If you were coming down the steep valley slope, as Axl and Beatrice were that evening, you would have seen below you some forty or more individual houses, laid out on the valley floor in two rough circles, one within the other. You might have been too far away to notice the variations in size and splendour, but you would have made out the thatched roofs, and the fact that many were "roundhouses" not so far removed from the kind in which some of you, or perhaps your parents, were brought up. And if the Saxons were happy to sacrifice a little security for the benefits of open air, they were careful to compensate: a tall fence of tethered timber poles, their points sharpened like giant pencils, completely encircled the village. At any given point, the fence was at least twice a man's height, and to make the prospect of scaling it even less enticing, a deep trench followed it all the way around the outside.

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