56 
but I conceive is best explained by its having been the spot where 
a court of compurgation by oaths used to be held. Aubrey has 
& passage uot inconsistent with this idea in his account of 
Ramsbury Manor. ‘Near this place (Bishopston), as the 
Indigence informed me, was some time a Sanctuary called Paradise, 
whither whosoever fled he was free from all arrests.” The name 
is also written Pardis, still more like Par Dieu or Pardie, the form 
of expression in taking an oath. It is therefore most probaby 
that here was the court or place in which the freeholders 
in early times met to take the oath of frank pledge and further 
internal regulations of the Manor. On the adjoining waste 
still stands the Manor pound. 
The garden wall of Avondale House extends from the river 
to the high road, and is the northern boundary of the Manor. 
Opposite to its angle against the road is a lane leading up into the 
Bannerdown road, which in the Saxon Land Limits is called the 
street (or Strata Via), the old Roman paved way to Cirencester 
from Devonshire. This lane is now the boundary of the parish 
and Manor ; we follow it for a quarter of a mile, and a very 
pleasant walk it is in sweet spring time and summer from the 
wilding growth of the hedges and wild flowers on the banks. At 
the point where the lane branches off into the Bannerdown road 
must have stood the old boundary stone, “Thorne Anne Stone.” 
It would be at an acute angle, the apex of a triangle of roads, 
that on the south going to Shockerwick,* and another coming up 
from that side, meeting the street in Bannerdown road at the One 
Stone.t 
* Tt is interesting here to take note of the name of Shockerwick—derived from 
Soc, Saxon, Soka—an old Law Latin word for a lordship enfranchised by this 
King, with the liberty of holding or keeping a court of his Soc-men or Socagers, 
t.é., of his tenants whose tenure is hence called Socagium or Socage (see Bos- 
worth’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary). Shockerwick then was a Manor within a 
Manor, with independent jurisdiction and naturally the Lord had his own 
Chapel for his Tenants. Be we 
+ It may be of interest to note that hereabouts is found a name that is sug- 
