. 
| 
| 
Bg the Rev. Canon J. L. Jackson, F.S.A. 167 
finding the names of Washington and Penn as at one time among 
North Wilts families, we should be glad to claim as Wiltshire men 
two such eminent historical characters as the Founder of Pennsylvania 
and the Founder of American Independence: but we have no right 
to them. In Purton Church, however, you will see the monument 
of an eminent man to whom we have a right, Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, 
a very distinguished astronomer in his day. You will notice it with 
the more interest and respect when you understand that he was 
grandfather to the gentleman who is now kindly occupying our 
President’s chair. Astronomy is the first of sciences; geology is 
the second. If the grandfather was accomplished in the one, I am 
not indulging in any idle flattery when I say that he is rivalled by 
the grandson in the other. 
Wootton Basser. 
If ‘to Wood-town, now shortened to Wootton, we add the sur- 
name of a family once lords there, we get the name of Wootton 
Basset. I need hardly say that many of our places have a double 
name, and the second is often that of some ancient family. There 
are several Woottuns—Wootton-under-Edge, i.¢., under the brow 
of the Cotswold Hills, on the borders of Gloucestershire ; Wootton 
Ryvers (from the Ryvers family), near Marlborough ; and Wootton 
Basset, sometimes called Wootton Vetus or Old Wootton ; and well 
is it entitled to that name, as I have no doubt it is one of the oldest 
places in the county. The Bassets were very great proprietors in 
Norman times. In Wiltshire they have left their mark at Wootton,at 
Winterbourne Basset, Compton Basset, Berwick Basset, and Basset 
Down, and that mark—their name—is about all that they haveleft, for 
I have never heard of anything that they did for the perpetual grati- 
tude of the county, except to found a small almshouse of St. John the 
Baptist at Wootton, which, however, together with its founders, 
disappeared long ago. It was in the year 1266 that Philip Basset 
and Thomas Gayton, Rector! of Wootton, joined together in setting 
ee eee 
1The Church was a Rectory till about A.D. 1363, when the great tithes were 
given by the Crown to Stanley Abbey, near Chippenham. From that time it 
became a Vicarage. 
