192 



Short Note*. 



p. 201, No. 641, which is also given in a corrected form in Earle's Land 

 Charters, p. 429. Its date is 983, and it gives the boundaries of certain 

 lands near Tisbury, in Wilts ; observe, not far from Henstridge (Hengist's- 

 ricgh). Some of the boundary names we can identify, as Cigel marc 

 (Chilmark), Nodre (the river Nadder), Funtgeal (Fonthill) ; others no doubt 

 might be recognised by anyone who knew the locality well, as Sapcombe, 

 Rodelee, Gificaucombe, Gofsdene ; and the Waermund'strew is one of these 

 boundaries. Of course it is not Warminster, but I should conjecture that at 

 Warminster, as near Tisbury, stood a Waermund's-tree, which gave the place 

 its name. It will thus be an English, and not a British, name. The tree 

 would be a mark tree, dedicated to a hero or a god, just as the special god 

 of borders, Woden, has given his name to Wanstrow ; or, it might be the 

 " sacred tree where the village with its elders met in the Tun-moot which 

 gave order to their social and industrial life." (See Green's Making of 

 England, p. 181, 183, 193.) And inasmuch as boundary marks were 

 sacred, and were also places of assembly, it may not be rash to conjecture that 

 the tree may have stood where the Church stands now ; just as " near Chertsey 

 is an ancient and venerable oak said by tradition to have been a boundary of 

 Windsor Forest, and called the Crouch, i.e., Crux, or Cross Oak." (Kemble, 

 Saxons, vol. i., p. 53.) Compare the name Bishopstrow, though the ex- 

 planation is slightly different. (See Jones, Hist, of the Diocese of Salisbury, 

 p. 54.) Whether Haigh means to identify " Waermundstrew in Wiltshire " 

 with Warminster, or whether he simply takes the name from the Saxon 

 document, without identifying it with any place, does not appear ; but we 

 may notice one further fact, that the document quoted above gives us 

 the earliest form (putting Worgemynster aside) of the termination of the 

 word, which is tre — not ter. In Domesday it is still Guermins^e, and 

 continues so till the fifteenth century. Mr. Daniell gives no instance of the 

 termination ter till the fifteenth century ; then it became fixed and regular, 

 and thus the last syllable, read with the second syllable, made an existing 

 English word aud so the etymology was obscured. 



Mr. Daniell thinks that the derivation suggested above is safer than his 

 own, and accepts it as the most probable. 



John U. Powell, M.A. 



Wootton Bassett Notes. 



(Reprinted from the Wootton Bassett Almanack, 1897.) "It may 

 perhaps not be generally known that the tower of the Parish Church 

 which was taken down at the restoration was not more than 40ft. in 

 height. It was, however, of exactly the same size as the present one, and 

 contained four large pieces of oak timber in the corners of the belfry. The 

 windows in it were of the Decorated period. On the east side could be seen 

 the mark of the roof of the Church to which it belonged, which must have 

 been a small, low edifice, supposed to have been built about A.D. 1300. 



" A portion of the Church of 1300 still exists, viz. : the window in which 

 the stained glass to the memory of the late Earl of Clarendon is placed. In 

 the chancel taken down at the restoration of which this window formed 



