THE 



WILTSHIRE MAGAZINE 



"multoettm manibus geande levattje onus." — Ovid. 



By the Eev. W. C. Plendebleath. 



AM BOUND, at the outset of my paper, to admit that 

 Cherhill is not a place distiDguished in history. In Cherhill 

 we never had a St. Dunstan to pull the Devil by the nose with a 

 pair of tongs, as everybody knows that he did in Calne. 1 In Cherhill 

 we have no such historic records as are to be read on every stone of 

 Lacock Abbey or Avebury Church. Worst of all, we have not even 

 any distinguished natives to tell you about : all our Miltons have 

 been mute and inglorious ; all our Cromwells, — well, let me say, 

 unknown to fame. In fact so very obscurely have we always lain 

 in our little nook under the downs that I cannot even find any 

 mention of us in Domesday Book, or in the Libri Evidentiarum, or 

 m the Osmund Register, or in Camden's Britannia. And even 

 Aubrey dismisses us with two lines, in which he tells of a piece of 

 stained glass in the Church, bearing the arms of the St. Amand 

 family, which had, I grieve to say, entirely disappeared long before 

 I came to Cherhill. 



And yet this village, lying as it does upon the borders of Mercia 

 and "Wessex, must have been the scene of many a well-contested 



1 Since this paper was in type I have received a note from my friend, Dr. 

 Codrington, Vicar of Wadhurst, Sussex (who is himself a Wiltshire man, being 

 one of the Codringtons of Wroughton), in which he says : — " This is quite untrue % 

 it was in Mayfield, the next parish to this. The very tongs are there now. 

 Besides, that was the origin of Tunbridge Wells, the nose being, cooled in that 

 spring, which has ever since tasted of iron and sulphur ! " 

 VOL. XXIV. — NO. LXXII. S 



