In 1130 Henry of Huntingdon, an archdeacon at Lincoln, was commissioned by his bishop to write a history of England. His was the first written account of a place called "Stanenges, where stones of wonderful size have been erected after the manner of doorways, so that doorway appears to have been raised upon doorway; and no one can conceive of how such great stones have been raised aloft, or why they were built there." The name derives from the Old English, "stan": stone, and "hengen": gallows. Medieval gallows consisted of two posts and a crosspiece. There is no record of executions at Stonehenge, although Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing six years after Henry, describes the massacre of four hundred and sixty British lords by treacherous Saxons. Geoffrey claims that, as a memorial to the dead, Uther Pendragon and Merlin stole the sacred megaliths known as the Giants’ Dance from the Irish by magic and force of arms and re-erected them on the Wiltshire Plain. The "Merlin theory" of Stonehenge’s construction, while certainly true to the spirit of Anglo-Irish relations, was a piece with the rest of Geoffrey’s Arthurian tapestry: a jingoistic fairy tale.