By the Rev. Canon J. E. Jackson. 



291 



ages, it is just possible that the hint may find a lodgement in the 

 memory of some one person who may think it over, and perhaps 

 follow it out. 



If I have had the good fortune of being able to provide you 

 with any little amusement in bringing before your notice a few 

 particulars of Chippenham, its people and its ways, in former 

 times, I would take the liberty of asking you to consider for a 

 moment how it has happened to me to be able to meet with these 

 memoranda ? It is because somebody or other at Chippenham 

 living at the time, was so kind as to note them and hand them down 

 to us. When you want to find out the history of the past, the 

 difficulty always is where to look for it. Few persons will take 

 the trouble of recording and preserving any note, memorandum, or 

 description of either place, person, or thing, describing matters 

 precisely as they are, whilst they, during their lives, see or know 

 them. In this perhaps there is nothing very unnatural. What 

 happens to us all, day by day seems so ordinary and common- 

 place, that to-day is soon forgotten, effaced, as it were, by the 

 following wave of to-morrow. 



But if any one person living in any parish or place of any kind, 

 would only take the trouble, the very small trouble, of noting down, 

 in any words that may occur to him, common events and changes, 

 the little incidents, the local alterations, of his place and time, I 

 would venture to promise such person, that if he would only keep 

 such a chronicle, adding to it, if possible, any drawings of things 

 as they are in his day ; if he would only take care to be accurate 

 and precise, so as to give to it a character of trustworthiness, and 

 then not forget to put his name and date upon it : not only would 

 he be a means of preserving from being utterly lost many local 

 events of his own time, but he would supply to future times some 

 curious information, with the chance of earning for himself a 

 small provincial celebrity. 



I speak after some little experience in these matters, and am 

 sure, that as we now find amusement in recovering even the least 

 details of what was going on, and how things were done in the 

 places in which we live, by those who lived there 300 years before 



VOL. XII. — NO. XXXVI. Y 



