166 
~ Calne. 
By the Rey. Canon J. E. Jacrson, F.S.A. 
¥AASUR Archeological Seciety has now been in existence, and 
has kept its ground, upon the whole, pretty well, for no 
less than thirty-five years; and during that time we have visited 
most of the principal towns in the county, some of them more than 
once. This is the first time that it has been in our power to hold a 
Meeting at Calne. We have often been about the neighbourhood, 
but never at the place itself, so that you have had no opportunity 
of hearing from a platform any account of your town and its past 
history. One reason (and in this case one is quite enough) is, that 
you had no platform for us to stand upon. Until lately there was 
no assembly room sufficiently spacious to receive with convenience 
a considerable company, such, more particularly, as has usually at- 
tended our evening parties. That want has now been supplied by 
the building in which we are assembled, and the Society with 
pleasure avails itself of the accommodation. 
After finding a platform, the next thing was to find the history 
to be delivered from it. In one of my weak moments I was prevailed 
upon to undertake this: for it certainly is a weak moment when a 
person undertakes to build a house without being provided either 
with the stone, the brick, the mortar, or the timber. This was very 
much the case here: for about Calne very little indeed has ever been 
published. The parish registers have been yery well taken care of, 
from a very early date: but they do not supply incidents or tran- 
sactions of general interest. : 
There is, indeed, in the Church a very remarkable old chest—one 
of those hopeful articles of venerable furniture at which an antiquary 
rushes, full of expectation to find in it no end of valuable information. 
But it is no wonder that any documents that may have been in it 
are lost, for the chest itself, by some strange carelessness, had been 
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