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Rh or Chippenham, having to pay for tobacco its weight in silver, "they called out their biggest shillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco." History and tradition flowed naturally to Aubrey. The country tradition that Cardinal Morton was a shoemaker's son from Bere in Dorset came to him while he was a schoolboy at Blandford. He was only eight when he first saw Stonehenge. How many thousands had seen it at that age and forgotten it, or never said so, just as they must have known once, as well as Aubrey, that "in North Wilts the milkmaids sing as shrill and clear as any swallow sitting on a barn." He quotes Chaucer. The wonders of the living world also were very great. He had seen with his own eyes, or some Jack or Jill had made him see, a whirlwind carry a child, with half the haycock where he had been lying, up over the elm-trees and down safe "in the next ground."

He was soon to know South Wiltshire almost as well as North. Perhaps his road to the school at Blandford took him past Stonehenge; for he cannot have been much above eight when lessons at Leigh Delamere, "a mile's fine walk" or pony-ride from home, were exchanged for an ordinary school, the good-natured Rector who had taught Hobbes for an ill-natured schoolmaster. To reach Blandford he must at any rate have crossed Salisbury Plain, the whole breadth of it, three of its rivers, and the ranges dividing them. Then when he was only sixteen, in 1642, and was sent for from Oxford to avoid the war, it was to Broad Chalk he went instead of to Easton Pierse. His father was renting the Manor Farm there, close to the third of those three