The Natural History of Wiltshire eBook

John Aubrey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 257 pages of information about The Natural History of Wiltshire.

The Natural History of Wiltshire eBook

John Aubrey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 257 pages of information about The Natural History of Wiltshire.
(1750); and a short abstract of it will also be found in Dodsworth’s Salisbury Cathedral (written by the late Mr. Hatcher), p. 172.  In a communication from the last named gentleman in 1841, when he was engaged upon his History of Salisbury, he wrote to me as follows:  “I have lately fallen upon what appears to have been Sir C. Wren’s original report relative to the cathedral; a very elaborate report on the state of the building in 1691, by a person named Naish; some good observations on the bending of the piers (anonymous); and several estimates and observations made by Price.  What I shall do with them I have not yet determined.” — J. B.]
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Wardour Castle was very strongly built of freestone.  I never saw it but when I was a youth; the day after part of it was blown up:  and the mortar was so good that one of the little towers reclining on one side did hang together and not fall in peeces.  It was called Warder Castle from the conserving there the ammunition of the West.
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Sir William Dugdale told me, many years since, that about Henry the Third’s time the Pope gave a bull or patents to a company of Italian Freemasons to travell up and down over all Europe to build churches.  From those are derived the fraternity of adopted Masons.  They are known to one another by certain signes and watch-words:  it continues to this day.  They have severall lodges in severall counties for their reception, and when any of them fall into decay the brotherhood is to relieve him, &c.  The manner of their adoption is very formall, and with an oath of secresy.

Memorandum.  This day, May the 18th, being Munday, 1691, after Rogation Sunday, is a great convention at St. Paul’s Church of the fraternity of the adopted Masons, where Sir Christopher Wren is to be adopted a brother, and Sir Henry Goodric, of the Tower, and divers others.  There have been kings of this sodality.
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At Pottern, a great mannour belonging to the Bishop of Sarum, is a very faire strong built church, with a great tower in the middest of the crosse aisle.  It is exactly of the same architecture of the cathedrall church at Sarum, and the windowes are painted by the same hand, in that kind of Gothick grotesco.  Likewise the church at Kington St. Michael’s, and that at Sopworth, are of the same fashion, and built about the same time, sc. with slender marble pillars to the windowes; and just so the church of Glastonbury Abbey, and Westminster Abbey.  Likewise the architecture of the church at Bishop’s Cannings is the same, and such pillars to the windowes.
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Project Gutenberg
The Natural History of Wiltshire from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.