By John Watson- Taylor. 



299 



oldest of those of which any record is preserved is one of the reign 

 of the Emperor Allectus {circa 293 A.D.), which was in a collection 

 made by the Eev. Christopher Knipe, a former vicar, bnt the large 

 majority of them are of a later date, and all are of common occurrence 

 elsewhere. No other trace remains at Erlestoke of the Roman 

 occupation, though it lasted four hundred years ; and of the Saxons 

 who succeeded them in the conquest of the south of England after 

 an interval of forty years, the only memorial is in the tradition 

 that some sixty years ago a Saxon stone coffin was unearthed 

 within the " Crate," an enclosure on the Sands, and that in the 

 course of its removal to the churchyard it was broken into pieces, 

 which have been lost. The location of the Roman coins seems to 

 point to the Sands as the place where the village stood in these 

 times, and the elevated situation is one that would afford security 

 from sudden attack while allowing the inhabitants easy access, when 

 in search of food, to the forest and the lake which probably occupied 

 apart of the parish and later became a marsh (Earl Stoke Marsh 1 ). 



With the Norman period the materials for local history begin 

 to accumulate more rapidly, and of these the most important is 

 Domesday Book, the report of the Commissioners appointed by 

 William the Conqueror to discover who held the land and how 

 much and on what terms they held it. In Domesday Book a 

 Stoche is twice mentioned, but in each case the reference is not 

 to Erlestoke but to Bradenstoke, 2 and it may therefore be con- 

 cluded that Erlestoke was part of another manor and included in 

 its description. Erlestoke is not singular in this respect, for, to 

 take a case from the immediate neighbourhood, the large parish of 

 Worton is included under Potterne, and just as Worton was con- 

 nected with Potterne ecclesiastically as well as manorially, so also 

 it is probable that Erlestoke being a chapelry of the parish of 

 Melksham, 3 was a member also of that manor. Seend, which was 



1 Andrews & Dury, Map of Wiltshire, 1753. 

 2 Jones, Domesday for Wiltshire, p. 68. 

 Sarum Charters and Documents, A.D. 1220; Ecton, Thesaurus, p. 394. 



