By John Watson- Taylor. 



297 



for the parish forms the southern apex of the elongated hundred 

 of Melksham, and is the most western of those that form the rural 

 district area and petty sessional division of Devizes and the eastern 

 parliamentary division of the county, while Devizes, the adminis- 

 trative centre and the market town is seven miles away. 



But, though small and remote, Erlestoke has an interesting 

 history, which, through its manor lords, connects the parish with 

 many of the most important military and political events of the 

 the five centuries that followed the Norman Conquest, while the 

 humbler story of the manor itself, its tenants and its customs, 

 offers an interesting reflection of country life and the many changes 

 it has undergone since that event. 



Of the various methods of compiling such a chronicle, that 

 which presents the different events, as far as possible, in chrono- 

 logical sequence, seems to afford the most interest, but it is not 

 until England had been for some years under Norman rule that 

 the materials are sufficient to admit of a continuous narrative, and 

 there remains a long vista of years, stretching back to the unknown, 

 of which the scanty records are those offered by the soil itself, 

 upon and below its surface. 



The most ancient of these is the round barrow, situated on the 

 brow -of the hill, not far from the old quarry on the Cheverell 

 boundary, once no doubt a landmark to dwellers in the vale but 

 now concealed by the long wood that has clothed the hillside for 

 a hundred years. The barrow contained, when opened a short time 

 ago, within a small cist cut in the chalk rock under the centre of 

 the mound, the calcined remains of human bones, and may be 

 included in the category of the majority of those barrows that lie 

 around Stonehenge, which Sir Eichard Colt Hoare attributed 

 to the Bronze Age. The investigations that have lately been 

 made at Stonehenge itself have led to the conviction, founded on 

 astronomical as well as archaeological grounds, that it also 

 belongs to the commencement of the Bronze Age, and is 

 be dated somewhere about the eighteenth century before Christ. 1 



1 Wilts Arch. Mag., vol. xxxiii., No. 99. 



