By Mr. C. MOORE, F.G.S., Cambridge Place, Bath:

A series of Fossil Fishes of the genus Pachycormus; ditto of the genus Leptolepis; a Cuttle Fish from the Lias; Fossil Lobster, Prawn, and Shrimp; two Fossil Teleosauri; a pair of Eyes belonging to an Ichthyosaurus; a series of Fossil Insects from the Lias and Tertiary beds; a series of Brachipodous Shells, and Fossil Foramenifera; the latter arranged in glass tubes with enlarged drawings.

BY MR. HOWITT, Devizes:

Plaster Cast (from a squeezing in clay) of a beautiful Finial, of early English date, from the monument of Bishop Bridport, (1262), in Salisbury Cathedral.

BY MR. J. PROVIS, Chippenham :—

An original portrait of Thomas Hobbes, born at Malmesbury, 1588, died, 1679; large engraving from Michael Angelo's celebrated painting of the Last Judgment; coloured drawing of Bowood House. Sixty specimens of Fossils from the Oxford clay; also some interesting remains of Mammalia, from the drift of North Wilts. Two cases containing plaster Casts of Grecian antiquities.

By Mr. ALFRED KEENE, Bath :

Portfolio of coloured Drawings, including views of Farleigh Castle and Chapel; Maud Heath's Pillar at Wick Hill; Malmesbury Abbey; the Churches of Great Chalfield and Bremhill; South Wraxhall Manor House; tomb of Inverto Boswell, king of the Gypsies, in Calne churchyard; Fountain at Derry Hill, &c.

BY MR. BRACKSTONE, Lyncombe Hill, Bath:

A cube of stone, with three of its sides engraved as if for a seal; one side represents a lion, another a wolf or dog; the third has a lion full-faced, with a stag in front of it, and in the foreground a lamb. It was found in July, 1852, in the garden of the late Mr. Giller, at Corsham.

An ancient sword, four feet in length, the hilt inlaid with silver, found in cleaning out the moat surrounding the ancient manor house at Kington Langley, Wilts; also a large iron key found at the same time.

An oblong piece of polished flint, found, together with a beautifully formed arrow-head of the same material, in grubbing up an ash tree on some waste land at Pick Rudge, in the parish of Overton, Wilts, 1848.

Bronze sword, dagger, and axe, from the counties of Tyrone and Donegal, Ireland.

BY MR. SPENCER, Bowood:

*

Fossil teeth and tusk of Elephas primigenius, found at Foxham; also a collection of Fossils from the Coral-rag, Kimmeridge clay, and Oxford clay of the neighbourhood of Chippenham.

BY J. RAWLENCE, ESQ., Wilton :

A personal Seal, formed of an antique intaglio set in silver, with medieval inscription.

BY A. GORE, ESQ., Melksham

A desk Seal, engraved with the arms of Trapnell, of Great Chalfield.

BY REV, G. FARLEY, Cherhill :—

A small collection of Fossils from the chalk.

D

BY MR. R. BROTHERHOOD, Chippenham :—

A numerous collection of Fossils and Minerals from the strata of North Wilts; also some fine Mammalian remains from the drift of the same district. BY MR. THOMAS HILL, Nettleton :

Fragments of armour, weapons, horse-trappings, &c., found in a tomb or vault formed by a wall five feet in thickness, at the south side of the Priory Farm house, Nettleton.

BY MR. H. GALE, Chippenham :

A limb of fossil oak from the railway cutting near Kellaways.

By Mr. A. P. HOLLAND, Devizes :—

A collection of rubbings from monumental brasses, chiefly in the counties of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire.

The following information respecting the ancient Bible exhibited by P. Audley Lovell, Esq., and mentioned in the foregoing list, p. 13, arrived too late for insertion in that place.

It is an exquisite manuscript probably of the fourteenth century, and appears to have been executed on the continent. The initial letters contain representations of various saints, in gilt and rich colours. According to a note inserted in the title-page of one of the volumes, it appears to have belonged originally to a foreign convent of Carthusians. It was brought to England A.D. 1407, and deposited probably in the library of Malmesbury Abbey, from whence it passed into the hands of an ancestor of the present owner, by whom some of the Abbey property, including a Manor House formerly occupied by the Abbots, was purchased from the crown at the dissolution of religious houses, temp. Hen. VIII. The manuscript is in excellent preservation, and each volume retains the ancient wooden binding.

19

On the Bistory of Chippenham.

By the Rev. J. E. JACKSON.

I HAVE chosen the History of Chippenham for a paper upon this occasion for two reasons: first, because the Wiltshire Archæologists have done the town the honour of chusing it for their Annual Meeting; and next, because as a topographical subject, it has not been much investigated before. Though it may not contain much that is curious or remarkable, still the place has a history. The difficulty has been where to find it; for, in most of our more ancient authorities, local memoranda are excessively rare. A short reference to ancient times will be necessary; but only so far as to enable you the better to understand the original condition of this neighbourhood, without which it is impossible to throw a proper light upon the early history of the town itself.

Every one knows that Britain, as our island was at first called, was visited in turn, by what an old writer calls four scourges;1 the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans.

THE BRITONS.

Of the primitive state of this part of Wiltshire before the first scourge fell upon it, there can be very little doubt. It was covered with forest, cleared here and there by a scanty population, and affording the finest hunting ground-not for fox-hunting, which, in its present style at least, is a modern invention-but deer hunting. If any body could have been found to follow him so far, a stag might have run, almost without leaving shelter, from North Wilts to the lower part of Hampshire. Of this long, and as it must have been, beautiful range of open forest scenery, the names and traces are still left in the forests of Braden, (which came down as low as

1 Henry of Huntingdon.

Bradenstoke,) Calne and Bowood, Chippenham and Pewsham, Blackmore, Selwood, Groveley, Gillingham, Cranbourn Chase, and the New Forest. At no great distance we still have Savernake and Marlborough Forest, probably a fair sample of what the whole must have been. It is quite certain that no county in England has been at all times more famous for field sports than this, from the days of King Arthur, to those of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort.

If venison is good living, these old Wiltshire Britons lived well. It is scarcely possible to open a barrow upon the Downs, without finding by the side of the skeleton the heads of hunting spears, or bones and horns of deer; so that it would almost seem that they not only lived upon venison, but sometimes died of it. Thriving on such fare very happily in their own way, they were interrupted, B.C. 65, by the lash of the first scourge, viz.:

THE ROMANS.

There is no mention of Chippenham in the Commentaries of Julius Cæsar, for several good reasons, of which two will suffice. First; because, in his time, there was probably no such place, certainly no such name: and next, even if there was such a place, Cæsar did not come into Wiltshire to look at it. It may be added, that even if he had come so far and had described it, I do not know that we should be bound to put implicit faith in his description. For though Cæsar was undoubtedly a very great soldier, he was also occasionally given to story telling. He has been convicted of this by (amongst others), a Wiltshire clergyman, of this very neighbourhood, the late Rev. Henry Barry, Rector of Draycote, in a little treatise called "Cæsar and the Britons." Mr. Barry maintains, ingeniously and with much learning, that the Britons could not have been the absolute savages described by Cæsar; and though, perhaps, Mr. Barry may have ridden his own hobby a little too far into the opposite extreme, and would appear to attribute to them a higher degree of civilization than they are likely to have possessed; still he points out great misrepresentations in Caesar's narrative.

Cæsar was an invader, but not a conqueror. He was forced to retire; and as soon as the Britons had driven him out, they

The real conquest was by

became as independent as before. Claudius, 62 years after Christ; and under the Romans this island remained until A.D. 450. Not that Chippenham so remained; for, (as just observed), of any town or even village having been on this site during the presence of the Roman scourge, no trace seems to have been discovered. In the neighbourhood there are several marks of Roman habitation; as at Studley, Bromham, Lacock, Box, and Colerne; (the remains of villas at the two latter places being at this moment open for inspection); near Bath, of course, very frequent; but at Chippenham, so far as I know, nothing. Devizes rejoices in a Roman name—a mark of the scourge: but, (as will presently be explained), that of Chippenham is Saxon; and, therefore, later than Roman. The site of the town is between, and at some distance from, two great Roman roads; the Foss on the north, which ran from Bath by North Wraxhall and Sherston; and another on the south, which went from Bath by Neston, and a little south of Lacock, through Spy Park, past Wans House and Heddington, to Marlborough. No main road passed over the site itself; so that as there is no Roman "Chippenham Station" to stop at, we may go on to the next scourge.

THE SAXONS FROM A.D. 450.

It is to the early part of the Anglo-Saxon period, that Chippenham seems capable of being traced; the name is undoubtedly of Saxon date; and, as to its meaning, there is no difficulty. It is not spelled quite in the original way; but names are often spelled as they are pronounced. Railway pronunciation has reduced it to two syllables-" Chip'nam :" and, on their labels, for the sake of still greater despatch in business, they have even shortened it to one "Chip." In so doing, however, (though without any design to restore the Anglo-Saxon tongue in its purity), they are really returning to that which is called, in grammar, the root of the word. In Saxon, c-e-a-p, pronounced cheap, signifies goods of any kind, cattle, or whatever is bought and sold; and the place where the buying and selling went on, was called-" the chepyng." The word is still retained in some of our towns, as