Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, Articles, &c. 137 



Salisbury St. Edmund's Bells and the fall of the tower on 



June 26th, 1653, are the subject of an article in Wiltshire News, Feb. 

 14th, 1913. 

 John Hungerford Pollen. By Anne Pollen. 1912. A long 

 review of this book appeared in Church Times, Oct. 11th, 1912. 



" A Wiltshire Village " by Alfred Williams. A long 



and interesting notice of this book comparing the optimistic view of 

 Wiltshire country life taken by the author with tbe pessimistic view 

 taken by Mrs. Ottley in " A Modern Boeotia," appeared in tbe Wilt- 

 shire Gazette, Dec. 5th, 1912. 



Salisbury. Some interesting details of boarding schools in Salisbury 

 in the reign of Q. Anne for young ladies of large fortunes (£1000 to 

 £10,000), and of the cost of their " boarding, breeding, and educating " 

 up to the age of 17 or 18, which seems to have varied from £12 to £16 a 

 year, £22 a year being thought " a great oppression," are given in Wilt- 

 shire Times, Nov. 23rd, 1912. 



Edward Slow, the Wiltshire Dialect Poet. Art by 



Alfred Williams in British Workman, March, 1913, with portrait and 

 view of his home at Wilton. 



The Icknield Way. By Edward Thomas, with 



illustrations by A. L. Collins. London: Constable and 

 Company, Ltd., 1913. 7s. 6d. net. 



Cloth, 8fin. + 5|in., pp. xv. + 320, eight illustrations in colour, 

 fifty-one line illustrations in text, with folding map. 



The author begins with a discursive essay on old roads in general, fol- 

 lowing for awhile as an example the Ox Drove " through Selwood Forest 

 by Maiden Bradley, over Whitesheet Hill," and the "London Drove 

 Road," by old Willoughby Hedge along the edge of Groveley Woods to 

 Salisbury. He mentions, too, another " Ox Drove " running some four 

 miles south of Salisbury by Winklebury to Shaftesbury. Coming to 

 the Icknield Way, he will not have it that its derivation has anything 

 to do with the Iceni, and after giving a selection of absurd guesses at 

 the etymology by various learned antiquaries, wisely concludes " and 

 still nobody knows or believes that anybody else knows." He then 

 reviews the various irreconcileable statements of the writers who 

 mention the road from the twelfth century downwards, the " Laws of 

 Edward the Confessor," Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon, 

 Holingshed, down to Drayton, Plot, and Camden's Britannia, showing 

 how the " Rycknield " and the " Icknield " ways are confused by the 

 earlier writers, and concludes that " Icknield Way (or Street) is the 

 name of two apparently distinct roads ; one with a Roman look running 

 north and south through Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the other 

 winding with the chalk hills, through Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Hert- 

 fordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and 

 Wiltshire." It is with this last that the author is concerned. 



