246 Potterne. 



Farleigh and Melksham, and south to Eding-ton, Imber, and Nether- 

 avon — an extent in round numbers of some 20 miles long by about 

 12 miles broad, or an area of some 240 square miles. As a hundred, 

 so deemed and constituted since the middle of the fourteenth cen- 

 turVj it is joined with Cannings, and comprises not only the two 

 parishes from which it takes its name but also those of Bromham, 

 West Lavington, and Kowde. 



Of such a place one would naturally suppose that materials would 

 be tolerably abundant out of which to weave a connected history. 

 I will guarantee from personal experience that any one who feels 

 inclined to make a topographical venture in this direction will soon 

 discover on what a meagre stock he has to draw. It is, I think, 

 Thucydides who says that the greatest honor of a good woman is 

 not to be talked about ; let us hope that Potterne was, under the 

 fatherly rule of so many successive Bishops, so quiet and well- 

 ordered a daughter of the see of Sarum, that she earned this praise, 

 and so in a small degree confirmed the truth of the old saying — 

 " Happy are the people who have no annals.^^ 



A strange illustration, from a somewhat strange quarter, may be 

 quoted in passing. Southey, in the "Doctor" (p. 311), says — 

 " Who was old Ross of Potterne that lived till all the world was 

 weary of him ? All the world has forgotten him now." — It is true; 

 — I have asked every one who might be able to throw light on the 

 history of old Ross — I have ferretted out the oldest inhabitant, or- 

 dinarily the parish oracle — but in vain. All the world certainly is 

 not yet weary of Potterne, but its history at all events seems like 

 old Ross to have been forgotten. Most topographers have in fact 

 simply given Potterne the go-by, in apparent unconsciousness of its 

 existence. Leland, who came to these parts about 1541, though he 

 speaks of " The Vyes " (Devizes) and its Castle, does not mention 

 Potterne. John Aubrey also is silent about it, unless indeed his 

 notings concerning it be in that " Liber B " which has been so long 

 missing, despite of our good friend Canon Jackson^s hue and cry 

 after it, and which seems to have been borrowed from the Ashmolean 

 Library but never returned to it. Cox, in his " Magna Britannia," 

 a book written in the early part of the eighteenth century, has a 



