322 



GARDENS OLD AND NEW. 



LOOK1XG SOUTH DOll'.V THE PERGOLA. 



straight out of Sonning's past history, which is 

 essentially ecclesiastical. When Alfred the Great 

 and his son Edward the Elder were consolidating 

 the Saxon realm, the great Winchester diocese was 

 divided, and the Wilsaetas obtained a bishop of 



their own. Ramsbury, 

 which lies on the Kennel 

 well within modern Wilt- 

 shire, was occasionally 

 his seat, but so also was 

 Sonning, for not only did 

 the Wilsaetas then spread 

 out hither, but, in out- 

 own time, the wide- 

 stretching old parish of 

 Sonning, only recently 

 curtailed, included a con- 

 siderable area of one of 

 Wiltshire's several fra<>-- 



O 



ments scattered about 

 Berkshire's territory- 

 Norman rearrangements 

 ultimately fixed the 

 governance of the 

 bishopric at Salisbury, but 

 Sonning remained a 

 bishop's manor, so that 

 I .eland was able to say 

 that in his day there 

 " was a fair old howse 

 of stone at Sonninge by the Thamise ripe longging 

 to the bisshop of Saresbyri and thereby a 

 fair parlce." But in 1575 the bishop made an 

 exchange with Queen Elizabeth, and took some 

 Dorsetshire lands in place of Sonning, which soon 



LOOKING XOR'IH UP THE PERGOLA. 



