By this time the Abingdon speculation had become strong enough to carry double: to be able to be called in to the help of other theories, on outside matters. The ingenious Welsh philologer, William Baxter,[47] gets from it an offspring _ergo_. He makes Abingdon the “Caleva Attrebatum,” _because_ it had been “Clovesho:” upon which, by a sort of “To-my-love and from-my-love” formula, Dr. W. Thomas[48] completes the symmetry of a logical circle, by citing “Calleva Attrebatum” as evidence that Cloveshoe is near Henley-on-Thames, then thought to be Calleva.
R. Gough, in Additions to Camden, leaves it at Abingdon on Bp. Gibson’s argument: and, throughout the eighteenth century, Abingdon seems to have been favoured; the writers being much given to copy each other. Dr. Lingard, 1803, quoting Capt. Stevens’s translation of Bede, says “probably Abingdon,” and so also puts it in his Anglo-Saxon map; but Capt. Stevens had only quoted both views, without adopting either.
The later editors of the Saxon Chronicle, Dr. Ingram and Mr. Thorpe, return to the tradition, contenting themselves with the simple gloss “Cliff-at-Hoo, Kent,” “Cliff near Rochester.” Miss Gurney, however, prudently says, “Cliff in Kent, or Abingdon.” Professor Earle gives the valuable note and question about Dr. Heath, before mentioned, but leaves the main question, of the place, open. On the other hand, the Dictionaries, since Somner: Lye says “fortasse Abbingdon,” and Dr. Bosworth follows with “perhaps Abingdon,” quoting both Somner and Lye.
But the nineteenth century took a fresh stride away from the start of the seventeenth. Whilst accepting from the eighteenth the inheritance of the doubt, it next renounced the claim itself for which the doubt had been raised. It is no longer Abingdon, but wherever it may be thought likely--Dr. Lappenberg[49] places it in Oxfordshire; Mr. N.E.S.A. Hamilton[50] “co. Berks.” Mr. Kemble more boldly carries it to “the hundred of Westminster, and county of Gloucester, perhaps near Tewksbury.”[51] Next year,[52] he more firmly says “Doubts have been lavished upon the situation of this place, which I do not share,” and concludes that it was “not far from Deerhurst, Tewksbury, and Bishop’s Cleeve; not at all improbably in Tewksbury itself, which may have been called Clofeshoas, before the erection of a noble abbey at a later period gave it the name it now bears.”