Some of the most popular talks I give are those dealing with the meaning of inn and pub names. Currently we don’t have a great variety of pub names in Wiltshire but we do still have some interesting ones. The Green Dragon at Alderbury was used by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewitt, as he was staying nearby while writing this novel. Dickens used many hostelries in his books and in this case he renamed it the Blue Dragon; perhaps the sign was somewhat faded to a pale blue and he misinterpreted it as it would have been unlikely that the name was on the building.

 
The Green Dragon at Alderbury

The green dragon came from the earls of Pembroke and many of the early names used the badges of great families. The red lion of John of Gaunt, the black bear of the earls of Warwick and the white hart of Richard II are still common today. From the 18^th century the full coat of arms was often used so that in Fovant we have the Pembroke Arms. The association with the badge or coat of arms often indicated that the family owned the property or were the chief landowners in the area.

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The story of how archives have survived can be almost as interesting as the documents themselves; but not quite. Last year a furniture restorer in Sussex sent some papers of the Hazland family of Woodborough which he found in a drawer in an antique chest that he was working on. We recently received a document written in 1804 that had been found in a wall in a cottage in Tetbury, Glos, in 1949. This find was of particular interest because it illustrates the social structure the parish of Charlton near Malmesbury around the time that Nelson was killed at Trafalgar.
The Schedule

It is a schedule of Assessed Taxes which included duties on houses, windows, carriages and servants. 93 people, of whom 52 are described as poor, are listed with their occupation or status. The completeness of the picture is confirmed by the 1801 census (for which no personal details were kept), which counted 88 families. The document suffered somewhat by its immuration, and subsequent treatment with adhesive tape, but the paper of the time, made from rags as opposed to wood pulp, is very durable and only one name is lost. 

By a strange coincidence a few weeks after this document was deposited we received a similar for Tisbury, dated 1825, which was found in a wall space in a house in the village, lived in by one of the assessors. It seems that filing away tax returns was taken to rather extreme lengths...

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