192 Short Notes. 
p. 201, No. 641, which is also given in a corrected form in Earle’s Land 
Charters, p. 429. Its date is 983, and it gives the boundaries of certain 
lands near Tisbury, in Wilts; observe, not far from Henstridge (Hengist’s- 
ricgh). Some of the boundary names we can identify, as Cigel mare 
(Chilmark), Nodre (the river Nadder), Funtgeal (Fonthill) ; others no doubt 
might be recognised by anyone who knew the locality well, as Sapcombe, 
Rodelee, Gificancombe, Gofsdene ; and the Waermund’strew is one of these 
boundaries. Of course it is not Warminster, but I should conjecture that at 
Warminster, as near Tisbury, stood a Waermund’s-tree, which gave the place 
its name. It will thus be an English, and not a British, name. The tree 
would be a mark tree, dedicated to a hero or a god, just as the special god 
of borders, Woden, has given his name to Wanstrow ; or, it might be the 
“sacred tree where the village with its elders met in the Tun-moot which 
gave order to their social and industrial life.’ (See Green’s Making of | 
England, p. 181, 183, 193.) And inasmuch as boundary marks were 7 
sacred, and were also places of assembly, it may not be rash to conjecture that | 
the tree may have stood where the Church stands now ; just as “ near Chertsey . 
is an ancient and venerable oak said by tradition to have been a boundary of 
Windsor Forest, and called the Crouch, ¢.e., Crux, or Cross Oak.” (Kemble, 
Saxons, vol. i, p. 53.) Compare the name Bishopstrow, though the ex- 
planation is slightly different. (See Jones, Hist. ofthe Diocese of Salisbury, . 
p. 54.) Whether Haigh means to identify ‘‘ Waermundstrew in Wiltshire ” 
with Warminster, or whether he simply takes the name from the Saxon 
document, without identifying it with any place, does not appear; but we 
may notice one further fact, that the document quoted above gives us 
the earliest form (putting Worgemynster aside) of the termination of the 
word, which is ¢tre—not ¢er. In Domesday it is still Guerminséve, and 
continues so till the fifteenth century. Mr. Daniell gives no instance of the 
termination fer till the fifteenth century ; then it became fixed and regular, 
and thus the last syllable, read with the second syllable, made an existing 
English word and so the etymology was obscured. 
Mr. Daniell thinks that the derivation suggested above is safer than his 
own, and accepts it as the most probable. 
JoHn U. Powett, M.A. 
Wootton Bassett Notes. 
(Reprinted from the Wootton Bassett Almanack, 1897.) “It may 
perhaps not be generally known that the tower of the Parish Church 
which was taken down at the restoration was not more than 40ft. in 
height. It was, however, of exactly the same size as the present one, and 
contained four large pieces of oak timber in the corners of the belfry. The 
windows in it were of the Decorated period. On the east side could be seen 
the mark of the roof of the Church to which it belonged, which must have 
been a small, low edifice, supposed to have been built about A.D. 1300. 
‘A portion of the Church of 1300 still exists, viz.: the window in which 
the stained glass to the memory of the late Earl of Clarendon is placed. In 
the chancel taken down at the restoration of which this window formed 
