30 



Devizes. 



for setting them forth there, that "in a county so destitute of | 

 antiquities, he was unwilling to omit so great curiosities." In ; 

 those days, no doubt, such things were more rare than now. 



Some doubt has been expressed whether these little household- j 

 gods were really Roman. They may not all of them have been 

 specimens of first-rate workmanship, but as they represent the 

 established deities of Roman worship, and one of them, more par- 

 ticularly, is an effigy of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, 

 Roman surely they must have been. A coin of the Emperor 

 Severus was found with these images. Dr. Stukeley, writing a 

 few years after 1714, mentions this discovery, and adds that several 

 other coins had been found thereabouts, and that Roman antiquities 

 were found there every day. Skeletons with Roman pottery near 

 them have within these few years been found in Pan's Lane : and 

 in the town itself coins have occasionally been met with, as in St. 

 John's Street and in digging the foundations of Mr. Locke's bank. 

 Putting all these discoveries together, it is a reasonable conclusion 

 that during the Roman occupation of Britain some of them were 

 domiciled hereabouts. 



They disappear : and after many years the Saxon kingdom of 

 Wessex is formed, and the whole of this neighbourhood for miles 

 round belonged to the Kings of Wessex. At some early period 

 the Crown, in establishing a Bishopric in this part of Wessex, gave 

 to the Bishop towards the maintenance of the See for ever, two of 

 the three great manors of which this neighbourhood consisted ; 

 viz., the Manor of Cannings, and that of Potterne, The third, 

 that of Rowde, continued for centuries to belong to the Crown. 

 Spelman, on what authority I know not, says that King Alfred 

 had a castle here. It may have been so; but somehow or other 

 during the Saxon period, there is no mention of any town by any 

 name whatsoever on this site. But that is no reason why there 

 may not have been something of a village on the old Roman ground 

 about Southbroom : for there are many villages that must have 

 existed in Saxon times, though they do not happen to be mentioned 

 in the brief histories of the events of those days. 



But now comes a difficulty. Wiltshire was surveyed in the 



