mouth, with coats of mail, lances, pikes, halberts, brown bills, batterdashers, bucklers," and "the meeting of the gentry was not at tippling-houses, but in the fields or forest, with their hawks and hounds, with their bugle horns in silken baldrics." All about him were old men to furnish him from the past. John Power, for example, an undergraduate of Gloucester Hall in the early seventeenth century, told Aubrey what an old college servant had told him about Thomas Allen the astrologer, that sometimes he met the spirits coming up his stairs "like bees." There was a great-nephew of this Allen, too, at Broad Hinton, on the other side of Wootton Bassett from Easton Pierse. One Jack Sydenham, who used to carry Aubrey in his arms and "sang rarely," had formerly served Thomas Bushell, of Enston in Oxfordshire, and remembered a workman discovering a rock there, "with pendants like icicles as at Wookey Hole (Somerset), which was the occasion of making that delicate grotto and those fine walks." Moreover, this same Jack Sydenham had served a neighbour of the Aubreys, Sir Charles Snell, of Kington St. Michael, who had built a ship, the Angel Gabriel, for Sir Walter Raleigh's Guiana design, and had paid for it with his manor of Yatton Keynell, the farm at Easton Pierse, Thornhill, and the church lease of Bishop's Cannings. Aubrey had met, too, a Worcestershire man from whom Raleigh permanently borrowed a gown at Oxford. Then, at Draycot Cerne the Longs lived, and Sir Walter Long had first brought tobacco into "our part of North Wilts, e.g. Malmesbury Hundred." The old yeomen of the neighbourhood told him how, when they went to market at Malmesbury
