170 



Calne. 



Wans; and in a field called West Park, about a quarter of a mile 

 west of Bromham, the remains of a villa, close to the road from 

 Chippenham to Devizes. A plate of a pavement discovered on this 

 spot is given in Sir R. C. Hoare's Ancient Wiltshire, vol. ii., p. 123. 

 At Derry Hill in 1680 such quantities of brass coins that (Aubrey 

 says) "the children played with them/'' In 1753 was found at 

 Studley a number of square Roman bricks, with the maker's 

 name, or -mark, upon them, which appeared to have formed part of 

 a heating-room attached to a bath. 1 At Bowood, between the house 

 and the lake, were once found traces of a Roman house. Calne 

 could not have been a Station on the Roman road from London 

 to Bath, because that road is nearly two miles off, and moreover, 

 there wa& no Station upon it between Marlborough and Wans : 

 nevertheless it is very likely that there was in the Roman times 

 a principal residence here for some person of importance, and 

 that, upon the site of the Castle House. A small town would, by 

 degrees, grow up about it, as was the case at Devizes, where, when 

 Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, built his fine castle, a town appears to 

 have sprung up : very little, if anything, being known about any 

 town having existed there before. 



The name of Calne, however, is not Roman : it is considered by 

 authorities to be a purely Celtic word. We pronounce it now 

 Calne (Cam), but in very old legal documents it is written Catena : 

 and in my native county — Yorkshire — I know a place spelled ex- 

 actly as the name of this town is, but it begins with a B., Balne, 

 invariably called Bawn. Mr. Whitaker, the historian of Manchester 

 (long deceased), speaking [vol. I., 187] of a place near there 

 called Colne, says that "all places of that name in Lancashire, 

 Gloucestershire, and Yorkshire, and the Calne of Wiltshire, are 

 derived from an ancient Celtic word, Col-aun, meaning, in that 

 language, a current of waters." 3 In truth, it was the proper name 



1 An account of this is given by Mr. Robert New to Dr. John Ward, of 

 Gresham College, in a letter, 1st June, 1753, preserved in the Brit. Museum, 

 Addit. MSS., Vol. x., Sloane, 6211, p. 9. The inscription on the bricks is stated 

 to have been I. V. C. DIGNI. 



2 See Dr. Campbell's suggestion, Appondix No. I, 



