312 Customs of Wishford and Barford in Gravely Forest. 



died in 1636, had held the rectory for sixty-three years and two 

 months. 



W, L. [Mr. Farquharson, writing-in the same journal, noted that 

 about 1885 the Midsummer tithes were usually let for about £14. 

 They proceed from [Wilton] Abbey Mead, on the Warminster side 

 of Wishford, and from another piece of water-meadow. The 

 customary method of letting is peculiar. The clerk of the parish 

 paces up and down between the Church porch and the gate, with 

 the Church key in his hand, for half-an-hour before sunset on 

 Rogation Monday (the letting of the grass holding good from that 

 date till November). The highest bidder ofiering before sunset is 

 the purchaser. As the sun sets, the clerk strikes the gate with 

 the key, and thus closes the auction. 



Under the path that runs beside the south wall of the chancel 

 lies a corpse that was biiried seven years after death. The widow 

 of John Brown, a farmer in Wishford, was placed in a lead cofhn 

 under the dining-room table (in the farmhouse now destroyed) 

 about 1800, and retained there until her sons could come and take 

 possession, as by the terms of their tenure the premises were to 

 be held only while one of the family was on the spot. Her late 

 husband had become the only freeholder in Wishford by an un- 

 disturbed possession of the premises and land for twenty years. 



{W.L.) 



Since the foregoing paper was read at Wilton, and while it was 

 in the press. Dr. Straton has kindly sent me a transcript of these 

 Customs in their Elizabethan form (1597) as they have been 

 transmitted through a terrier of Wishford drawn uj) or transcribed 

 early in the reign of George II. (1729).^ 



Tlie Elizabethan Customs consist of only ix. (or x.) paragraphs 

 or items which in the next reign had grown to fifteen, the claims 

 or privileges of the freeholders (and, in one instance, at least, those 

 of the lord of Wishford, as "fee forester,"- viz., in § 12 of ItiOo as 



' Copy of terrier A.D. 1728 (Pembroke MS.), now in the Blackmore 

 Museum, Salisbury, No. 1484, incorporating customs of 1597, 1632, &c. 



- Or " fee foster," (incorrectly written "free forster " in 1729. 



