Great Bedwin, Wiltshire

Description
Bedwin, or Bedwyn, Great, a small old town and a parish in the hundred of Kinwardstone, Wiltshire. The town stands on the Kennet and Avon Canal, near Wans Dyke, 5 miles SW of Hungerford, and has a station on the G.W.R., 66 miles from London. It is supposed to have been the Leucomagus of the Romans; and it was the Bedgwyn or Bedewind of the Saxons. It was the residence of Cissa, the Saxon viceroy of Wilts and Berks; and the scene, in 675, of a desperate battle between the forces of Wessex and those of Mercia. It enjoyed the privileges of a city under the Saxons, and retained them after the Conquest. It was a borough by prescription, and sent two members to parliament from the time of Edward I. till disfranchised bv the Act of 1832. It has an ancient church and a dissenting cliapel. The-church is cruciform, mixedly Norman and Englisli, and built of flint; was restored in 1854; has a fine central tower r shows curious sculpturings on its round pillars, and rich Norman decorations on its obtusely-pointed arches ; and contains interesting monuments of the Stokes and the Seymours. Dr. Willis, a physician of the 17th century, who founded a philosophical society at Oxford, the germ of the Royal Society of London, was a native. The town has a post office under Hnugerford, and fairs on 26 and 27 July. Acreage, 9933 ; population of the civil parish, 1627; of the ecclesiastical, 723. The parish includes also the tithings of Orofton and Wolfhall, East and West Grafton, Martin, Wexcombe, and Wilton. The manor belonged once to the De Clare family; was granted by Henry VIII. to his brother-in-law, Sir E. Seymour; and passed by marriage to Thomas, Lord Bruce, second Earl of Ailcsbnry, in 1678, in whose family it still remains. Castle Hill, about a mile S of the town, takes its name from an ancient entrenchment in which large quantities of Roman bricks and tiles have been found. Chisbury, on Wans Dyke, 1 1/2 mile N by E of the town, is a very fine Saxon camp of 15 acres, with rampart 45 feet high, and incloses an ancient chapel in Decorated English, now used as a barn. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Salisbury; gross value, £210. Patron, the Marquis of Ailesbury. The vicarages of East Grafton and Savernake Forest are separate benefices. There is a Wesleyan chapel at Wilton, and a Primitive Methodist chapel at Wexcombe.