From Newberry the Roman road (I believe coming from Silchester) passes east and west to Marlborough, the RomanTAB. LXII. LXIII. Cunetio,[47] named from the river. This town consists chiefly of one broad and strait street, and for the most part upon the original ground-plot; nor does it seem unlikely that the narrow piazzaTAB. XI. 2d vol. continued all along the sides of the houses is in imitation of them: the square about the church in the eastern part one may imagine the site of a temple fronting this street: to the south are some reliques of a priory: the gate-house is left: on the north has been another religious house, whereof the chapel remains, now turned into a dwelling-house. Where now is the seat of my lord Hartford was the site of the Roman castrum, for they find foundations and Roman coins; I saw one of Titus in large brass: but towards the river, and without my lord’s garden-walls, is one angle of it left very manifestly, the rampart and ditch intire: the road going over the bridge cuts it off from the limits of the present castle: the ditch is still twenty foot broad in some part: it passed originally on the south of the summer-house, and so along the garden-wall, where it makes the fence, to the turn of the corner: the mark of it is still apparent broader than the ditch, which has been repaired since, but of narrower dimension: then I suppose it went through the garden by the southern foot of the mount, and round the house through the court-yard, where I have marked the track thereof with pricked lines in [Plate 62]. There is a spring in the ditch, so that the foss of the castrum was always full of water. I suppose it to have been five hundred Roman feet square within, and the Roman road through the present street of Marlborough went by the side of it. Afterward, in Saxon or Norman times, they built a larger castle, upon the same ground, after their model, and took in more compass for the mount; which obliged the road to go round it with a turn, till it falls in again on the west side of the mount at the bounds of Preshute parish. Roman coins have been found in shaping the mount; which was the keep of the later castle, and now converted into a pretty spiral walk, on the top of which is an octagonal summer-house representedTAB. I. Tab. I. This neighbouring village, Preshute, has its name from the meadows the church stands in, which are very low: in the windows upon a piece of glass is written, DNS RICHARDUS HIC VICARIUS, who I believe lived formerly in a little house at Marlborough, over-against the castle, now an ale-house, where his name is cut in wood in the same old letters over the door.
Leucomagus.
Great Bedwin I take to be the Leucomagus of Ravennas; for that and the present name signify the same thing, viz. the white town, the soil being chalk: he there places it just before Marlborough, cunetzione. We saw near it the continuation of Wansdike.TAB. LXIV. This town is an old corporation: in it the famous Dr. Tho. Willis, the ornament of our faculty, was born. In the church lies the monument of a knight cross-legged; on his shield, barry of six argent and gules, an orle of martlets sable; over all three escallops of the first on a bend of the third. Upon a stone in brass in the choir,
Bellocampus eram graja genetrice semerus
Tres habui natos, est quibus una soror.
Here lyeth the body of John Seymour, son and heyre of Sir John Seymour and of Margery oon of the doughters of Henry Wentworth knyght, which decesed the xv day of July the yer of our lord M. D. X. on whose soul Ihu have mercy, and of your charity say a pater nostr and a ave.
Hic jacet dns Thomas Dageson quondam vicarius istius ecclesie qui obiit 7. die Decemb. Ao dni. M.D.I. cujus anime propitietur deus amen. on a brass in the middle aile.
Roger de Stocre chev. ici gycht deu de sa alme eyt merci. in the south transept.
The town arms are, a man standing in a castle, with a sword in his hand. Castle copse, south-east from the town about half a mile, as much from Wansdike, containing about fourteen acres, seems the old Roman castle. Howisdike I suppose a camp upon an eminence and in an angle made by the Wansdike. They showed us a brass town gallon, from the Winchester standard, given by my lord Nottingham. In the east window of this church some time since was the picture of a priest with two crutches, a cup in his hand, and a cann standing by him, with this inscription, which Mr. le Neve Norroy gave me: he transcribed it out of an old MS. now in the library of Holkham in Norfolk, formerly Sir Ed. Coke’s book; and for its antiquity I think it not unworthy of mentioning.