By the Rev. J. E. Jackson. 41 
Sheldon, and Lowdon, besides a very considerable number of good 
Wiltshire manors elsewhere. The whole of his property was 
forfeited ; and the Crown kindly promised to take care of it until 
the next heir, then a minor, should reach the age of twenty-one. 
Before that time arrived King Henry and his successor King 
Edward VI. died: and Queen Mary wishing to ingratiate herself 
with her new Bailiff and Burgesses of Chippenham, severed a goodly 
slice from the Hungerford estates and bestowed it upon them. 
The Bailiff and Burgesses were only just in time to receive it, for 
the Heir of Lord Hungerford came of age twenty-three days after 
the date of the charter, when all the rest of his family property 
was restored to him by Letters Patent. The conditions annexed 
to the grant of these lands to the borough were, that the profits 
thereof should maintain two Burgesses in Parliament, and keep in 
repair the bridge over the Avon and a high footpath called ‘the 
Causeway” leading from the town to Derry Hill. - 
About sixty-six acres of Lord Hungerford’s land given by Queen 
Mary were afterwards claimed by the Crown, as assart land of the 
Forest of Chippenham, but on payment of £40 they were secured 
to the borough by Letters Patent of King James I., dated 21st 
November, 1607. 
Tue Parish Cuurcu 
Is in one respect not a bad study for Archzologists, exhibiting as 
it does samples of various styles, very old, very new, very good, 
and very so so. 
That a church, held by one Bishop Osbern, was here in the reign 
of the Confessor, has been already stated, but as Chippenham had 
even at that time been for some hundreds of years the residence of 
Wessex Royalty, some building of the kind, with a clerical establish- 
ment attached to the court, would probably have been on the spot 
from the first conversion of the province to Christianity. No visible 
part of the present church is quite so old as the Norman Conquest, 
but the chancel arch is not far short of it, being apparently of about 
A.D. 1120. The masonry of the chancel walls outside, consisting 
of small unhewn stones, and a small window on the north side, are 
also much older than the general body of the church. If the chancel 
G 
