D.A. Crowley – författare

Volume XI contains the histories of two scat-tered hundreds. The parishes of Downton hundred are ranged along the southern county boundary, and those of Elstub and Everleigh hundred are centred on Enford in the Avon valley but have outliers throughout Wiltshire. Downton hundred represents the Wiltshire lands of the see of Winchester, Elstub and Everleigh the estates administered by the cathedral priory of St. Swithun, Winchester. Though lacking geographical cohesion, both hundreds are characterized by open downland and chalk streams. Much downland on either side of the Avon valley is now in Ministry of Defence ownership and Everleigh Manor is an army research laboratory. The downsand rivers have always afforded good sport. Cours-ing was formerly popular at Netheravon and Everleigh. Racehorses are still trained at Wroughton. Downton and Hindon, a 'new town' of the early 13th century, were local market centres. Both were parliamentary boroughs until 1832-. Some industries have been of more than local importance. At Westwood on the Somerset border limestone was quarried and woollen cloth and other textiles were made from the Middle Ages until the Second World War. Old Court at Avoncliff, later used as a work-house, was built to house textile workers c.1792. Sarsens cut at Overton in the Kennet valley were supplied to a wide market from the mid 19th century tothe mid 20th. Tanning has flourished at Downton since the 17th century. Watercress for London, Bristol, and Plymouth has been grown in Bishopstone since 1890. Country houses include Standlynch, renamed Trafalgar, House, the nation's gift to Nelson's heirs in 1815, and Ham Spray House on the Berkshire border, the home of Lytton Strachey and the painter Dora Carrington in the 1920s.

This volume contains the histories of the hundreds of Ramsbury and Selkley and of the borough of Marlborough. The area is mostly on the Marlborough Downs in the north-east quarter of Wiltshire. The Kennet flows east through both hundreds and skirts the town of Marlborough to the south. Its valley and those of its tributaries have provided settlement sites, including those of Avebury, probably an important cult centre in the Neolithic Period, and the Romantown of Cunetio, and determined many lines of communication from earliest times. The area has always been predominantly agricultural. Tracts of rough downland, some the site of warrens from the Middle Ages, are still used for sport. In the 19th and 20th centuries racehorses have been trained on the downs notably at Beckhampton in Avebury and at Manton in Preshute. At Aldbourne Fustians were manufactured and bells were founded. Ramsbury hundred, which comprised Bishopstone in the Cole valley and the large parish of Ramsbury, belonged to the bishops of Ramsbury and contained a pre-Conquest see. It passed to the bishops of Salisbury, the site of whose medieval palace is marked by Ramsbury Manor. Littlecote House, once the home of the Darrells, dates mainly from the 14th and 16th centuries and is open to the public. An airfield was established in Ramsbury during the Second World War. The village is chiefly known as the home of the Ramsbury Building Society formed in 1846. Marlborough was a borough from the 11th century until 1974. It was represented in parliament from 1275 to 1885 and from the 18th century was a pocket borough of theBruces. Its medieval castle was a favourite residence of Henry III and its site is now occupied by Marlborough College. Marlborough has long been important as a market town where main routes converge rather than as a manufacturing centre.

Chalke and Dunworth hundreds are in south-west Wiltshire on the Dorset border. The parishes of Chalke hundred were united by being part of Wilton abbey's estate before the Norman Conquest, but most of the hundred is homogeneous. Long and narrow parishes lie north and south across the river Ebble and are characterized by extensive chalk downs. Until farmsteads were built on the downs in the 19th cen-tury, nearly all settlement was in small riverside villages. From the Reformation to the 19th century the earls of Pembroke owned most of the eastern parishes. Sheep--and-corn husbandry and more recently arable and dairy farming was the pattern of agriculture in all the parishes except Semley where there is a remarkable survival of common pastures. Dunworth hundred is largely in the Vale of Wardour, and land in most of its parishes belonged to the Barons Arundell of War-dour as successors to Shaftesbury abbey. It is an area of broken landscape and mixed farming in which only Tisbury has grown larger than an ordinary village. Except at Tisbury, there has been little manufactur-ing in the area, but Portland stone has been extensively quarried at Chilmark, Teffont Evias, and Tisbury, and greensand stone has been quarried at the Donheads. Partly because of its stone, Dunworth hundred is notable for its secular buildings. The castle at Wardour is the only one to survive in Wiltshire; Fonthill Abbey in Fonthill Gifford was the most remarkable house of its day in England. Among the many farm-houses of local stone which survive from the Middle Ages is Place Farm at Tisbury, which was frequently visited by the abbess of Shaftesbury and has the largest medieval barn in England. Except for Sedgehill parish and part of Donhead St. Mary parish both hundreds are in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty: the exceptions are in aSpecial Landscape Area.

This volume contains the history of the town of Malmesbury and twenty surrounding parishes forming Malrnesbury hundred. The town evolved in the Anglo-Saxon period round the early monastic foundation: the town's position on a promontory between the Tetbury and Sherston branches of the Bristol Avon and the abbey's surviving buildings remain the town's most noticeable features. The abbey's estate included more than 20,000 acres in the twenty parishes, besidesmore outside the hundred. At the time of the Norman Conquest the town was as developed as any in Wiltshire, but after that it declined in comparison with neighbouring market towns, and its medieval street pattern, with the extension of the urban area into the adjoining parish of Westport, has persisted. In the surrounding parishes the abbey's lands were broken up at the Dissolution, but the Howards, earls of Suffolk and of Berkshire, built up a large estate centred on Charlton Park, the grandest mansion in the hundred. Among other large houses, Draycot House has been wholly destroyed, and Seagry House largely so. The rural parish churches include a fine example at Crudwell. The history of the landscape is traced in the inclosure of open arable fields from the 16th and 17th centuries; on the east the hundred adjoins Braydon forest, and the inclosure of the forest and its purlieus in the 1630s was also influential physically, socially, and economically. In the 20th century the area has been much affected by the building of the M4 motorway. One of the parishes which the road touches is Stanton St. Quintin, which might serve as a paradigm for the area, with its two villages (one with the church, manor house, rectory house, and school, the other with copyhold farmsteads and a nonconformist chapel), its manorial descent recorded without a break, its open fields and common pastures of which the location and dates of inclosure are known, its ancient woodland, possible lost village, hermitage, moated site, walled park, 20th-century housing, airfield, and motorway junction.

This volume contains the history of 25 parishes in Amesbury hundred and Branch and Dole hundred. Apart from the small towns of Amesbury and Lud-gershall the site of a small royal castle in the Middle Ages and a parliamentary borough, the area was agricultural, with little woodland. The parishes lie on chalk downland, mostly on the south-east part of Salisbury Plain, bearing many marks of prehistoric activity. Stonehenge, with its hinterland a World Heritage Site from 1984, stands in Amesbury parish. Among monuments from the historic period the churches are small, medieval fortified houses at Sherrington and Stapleford have disappeared, the only manor house of more than local import-ance was that called Amesbury Abbey, and there is little medieval vernacular building. The numerous small villages lie close together beside the rivers Avon, Bourne, Till, and Wylye, flanked from the 17th century by water meadows. They depended on sheep-corn husbandry, and in many parishes open fields survived until the 19th century, inclosure being followed by the building of down-land farmsteads. In the 20th-centurv tanks have succeeded sheep over muchof Salisbury Plain, where from 1897 the War Department bought estates for mili-tary training, closed roads, and set up firing ranges. Army camps were built at Tidworth, Bulford, and Larkhill, stimu-lating the growth first of Amesbury and Ludgershall, both with railway stations, and then of Durrington. Airfields and other military centres were established. To the south-west rural villages remain surrounded by farmland.

THE VOLUME relates the history of the 15 parishes in Kinwardstone hundred in east Wiltshire. The hundred lay between two medieval royal forests, Savernake and Chute. It is generally fertile and was devoted to sheep-and-corn husbandry. Each of c. 45 villages and hamlets in it had its own set of open fields and its own common pasture, and there is evidence of colonization from some of the larger villages. Much of the common pasture was inclosed in the 17th century, most of the open fields were inclosed in the 18th. Outside the villages new farmsteads were built on downland in the 19th century, and in many of the villages in the later 10th century the sites of farmsteads were used fornew housing. The largest villages are Great Bedwyn, which was an early borough and retains a small market square, Pewsey, which had a market in the 19th century and became a local shopping centre in the 20th, and Burbage. Only 12parish churches stood in the hundred in the Middle Ages, when most of their revenues were taken by religious houses and prebendaries of Salisbury cathedral; their parishes were large and most villages lacked a church. Five new churches were built in the 19th century. A great estate in the hundred was accumulated by Protector Somerset, whose descendants built Tottenham House in parkland on the edge of Savernake forest. Notable among other secular buildingsin the hundred is the red-brick almshouse for 50 widows which was built at Froxfield in the 1690s.PARISHES: GREAT BEDWYN (INCLUDING GRAFTON), LITTLE BEDWYN, BURBAGE, BUTTERMERE, CHILTON FOLIAT, CHUTE, CHUTE FOREST, COLLINGBOURNE KINGSTON, EASTON, FROXFIELD, MILTON LILBOURNE, PEWSEY, SAVERNAKE, TIDCOMBE (AND FOSBURY), WOOTTON RIVERS.