EDITORIAL NOTE

The present volume, the fourth in the Wiltshire series to be published, has been prepared under the superintendence of the Wiltshire Victoria County History Committee. The origin and constitution of that Committee are described in the Editorial Note prefixed to the Victoria History of Wiltshire, Volume VII, and it is sufficient here to say that the Committee have been good enough to continue, and indeed to augment, their remarkable grants, for the support of a local editor, with an assistant, and have thus enabled the University of London to play its vital part as publisher.

Users of the History will be familiar with the original scheme of arrangement under which the general history of a county was broken into single chapters on ecclesiastical, political, and economic history, each covering the whole period of time. In the case of Wiltshire this plan has not been followed, and a substantial modification is to be found in this volume, where, in place of a single chapter on political history, there will be found two sequences of articles, the one on the administrative, the other on the parliamentary history. These features, like the article on the administration of public health in the county, are experimental in character. The design of the chapter on education is more conventional.

Thanks are due to the Clerk of the Peace for Wiltshire and Clerk of the County Council (Mr. P. A. Selborne Stringer, D.L.) and to the Wiltshire County Archivist (Mr. M. G. Rathbone) for many services rendered to the editors.