208 Wiltshire Titles’ Registration. 
We understand that this interesting excavation is to be continued: 
and, in concluding the present notice of what has been already 
done, we cannot offer to our readers a more satisfactory apology for 
meddling with dead men’s bones, than that which has been made 
by Mr. Akerman himself. “Let it not be said that a spirit of idle 
curiosity has urged us to disturb the ground where the primitive 
inhabitants of a forgotten lineage have slept undisturbed for twelve 
centuries. Their weapons, their decorations are valueless to the 
idle observer, but to the archeologist they are of great price. They 
afford to him a retrospect of an age that has long since passed away : 
they furnish fragmental evidence of what we once were: and con- 
tribute notes for a yet unwritten chapter of our history. 
Wiltabire Citlew’ “Registration, 1709. 
On the subject of the public registration of bargains and sales, 
now felt to be a question of national importance, the County of 
Wilts, viewed as a community, took the initiative nearly a century 
and a half ago. It is true that Sir Matthew Hale had previously 
delivered his views on the point, in a pamphlet of 26 pages, 
published in 1694, eighteen years after his death, but there appears 
(so far as we are aware) no trace of the county movement de- 
veloped in the following document having been preceded by any 
similar expression in other parts of the kingdom. 
On the 8th of December, in the 8th year of Queen Anne; a 
petition of the High Sheriff of Wilts, Her Majesty’s Justices of 
the Peace, and gentlemen of the Grand Jury, assembled at the 
quarter sessions of the peace, held at Marlborough, 4th October, 
1709, and of several of the Justices of the Peace, and other gen- 
tlemen and freeholders of the same county, was presented to the 
House and read; setting forth “That the lands in the said county 
