WILTSHIRE MAGAZINE. 
“MULTORUM MANIBUS GRANDE LEVATUR ONUS. ’—Ovid. 
Cherhill Gleanings. 
By the Rev. W. C. PLENDERLEATH. 
AM BOUND, at the outset of my paper, to admit that 
Cherhill is not a place distinguished in history. In Cherhill 
we never had a St. Dunstan to pull the Devil by the nose with a 
pair of tongs, as everybody knows that he did in Calne.!_ In Cherhill 
we have no such historic records as are to be read on every stone of 
Lacock Abbey or Avebury Church. Worst of all, we have not even 
any distinguished natives to tell you about: all our Miltons have 
_ been mute and inglorious; all our Cromwells,—well, let me say, 
unknown to fame. In fact so very obscurely have we always lain 
in our little nook under the downs that I cannot even find any 
_ mention of us in Domesday Book, or in the Libri Evidentiarum, or 
- in the Osmund Register, or in Camden’s Britannia. And even 
Aubrey dismisses us with two lines, in which he tells of a piece of 
stained glass in the Church, bearing the arms of the St. Amand 
family, which had, I grieve to say, entirely disappeared long before 
Icame to Cherhill. 
And yet this village, lying as it does upon the borders of Mercia 
and Wessex, must have been the scene of many a well-contested 
= Since this paper was in type I have received a note from my friend, Dr. 
Codrington, Vicar of Wadhurst, Sussex (who is himself a Wiltshire man, being 
‘one of the Codringtons of Wroughton), in which he says:—“ This is quite untrue : 
it was in Mayfield; the next parish to this. The very tongs are there now. 
Besides, that was the origin of Tunbridge Wells, the nose Bane cooled in that 
spring, which has ever since tasted of iron and sulphur!” 
VOL, XXIV.—NO. LXXII. s 
