By John Watson-Taylor. 297 
for the parish forms the southern apex of the elongated hundred 
of Melksham, and is the most western of those that form the rural 
district area and petty sessional division of Devizes and the eastern 
parliamentary division of the county, while Devizes, the adminis- 
trative centre and the market town is seven miles away. 
But, though small and remote, Erlestoke has an interesting 
history, which, through its manor lords, connects the parish with 
many of the most important military and political events of the 
the five centuries that followed the Norman Conquest, while the 
humbler story of the manor itself, its tenants and its customs, 
offers an interesting reflection of country life and the many changes 
it has undergone since that event. 
Of the various methods of compiling such a chronicle, that 
which presents the different events, as far as possible, in chrono- 
logical sequence, seems to afford the most interest, but it is not 
until England had been for some years under Norman rule that 
the materials are sufficient to admit of a continuous narrative, and 
there remains a long vista of years, stretching back to the unknown, 
of which the scanty records are those offered by the soil itself, 
upon and below its surface. 
The most ancient of these is the round barrow, situated on the 
brow of the hill, not far from the old quarry on the Cheverell 
boundary, once no doubt a landmark to dwellers in the vale but 
now concealed by the long wood that has clothed the hillside for 
a hundred years. The barrow contained, when opened a short time 
ago, within a small cist cut in the chalk rock under the centre of 
the mound, the calcined remains of human bones, and may be 
included in the category of the majority of those barrows that le 
around Stonehenge, which Sir Richard Colt Hoare attributed 
to the Bronze Age. The investigations that have lately been 
made at Stonehenge itself have led to the conviction, founded on 
astronomical as well as archeological grounds, that it also 
belongs to the commencement of the Bronze Age, and is 
be dated somewhere about the eighteenth century before Christ. 


) Wilts Arch. Mag., vol. xxxiii., No. 99. 
