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96 rivers, the Ebble. The father "was not educated to learning, but to hawking," and as the boy had been allured to reading by the "Religio Medici" in 1643, and "in those days fathers were not acquainted with their children," it was in some ways a "most sad" life. But he was made a complete Wiltshireman. Years later, when he stated that the Wiltshire greyhounds were the best in England, he added that he and his father had "as good as any were in our times in Wiltshire," and that they were generally fallow, or black, or black and white. Between the country about Easton Pierse and that about Broad Chalk he felt great differences. North Wiltshire, where they only milked cows and made cheese, and fed chiefly on milk meats, "which cools the brains and hurts the invention," made the people "melancholy, contemplative and malicious," loving religion and litigation; but in the South, on the Downs, where most is tillage, "their flesh is hard, their bodies strong: being weary after hard labour, they have not leisure to read and contemplate religion, but go to bed to their rest, to rise betime the next morning to their labour." The lesser differences were strange. For example, his books gathered more mould on their bindings in the hill country at Chalk than in the vale at Easton. Then, again, some of the high-lying places, like Peatwood, that might have been thought healthy, were not so; they were constantly in mist; people did not live long there.

Apparently Broad Chalk became Aubrey's home on his father's death early in the fifties of the century. He lived there mostly, but sometimes at Easton; his mother died there in 1685, but was taken to Kington St. Michael