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Melksham () is a medium-sized English town, on the River Avon in the county of Wiltshire. It is east of the city of Bath, south of Chippenham, west of Devizes and north of Warminster on the A350 national route. The 2001 UK census recorded Melksham as having 20,000 inhabitants, including sizeable environs such as Bowerhill and Berryfield; as such it is Wiltshire's fifth-largest town by population after Swindon, Salisbury, Chippenham and Trowbridge.〔Salisbury is a city.〕 ==History== The town of Melksham developed at a ford across the River Avon and the name is presumed to derive from "''meolc''", the Old English for milk, and ''"ham"'', a village. On John Speed's map of Wiltshire (1611), the name is spelt both ''Melkesam'' (for the hundred) and ''Milsham'' (for the town itself). Melksham was a royal estate at the time of the Norman Conquest Melksham is also the name of the Royal forest that occupied the surrounding of the area in the middle ages.〔 p222〕 In 1539 the prioress and nuns of Amesbury surrendered their Melksham estates to the king which they had held for about 250 years. This property, which consisted of the Lordship of the Manor and Hundred, was in 1541 granted to Sir Thomas Seymour. Seymour then sold it to Henry Brouncker, who had already made purchases of real estate in the neighbourhood. At some uncertain date, perhaps about 1550, Brouncker built a residence for himself on the site of an earlier mansion. This was known as Place House, built in a style suitable to that of a resident lord, who was also a man of considerable wealth. Three generations of the family lived here: Henry Brouncker the founder, (d.1569), his son, Sir William, and his grandson Henry. On the death of this last Henry, about 1600, it became manifest that the Brouncker estate was heavily encumbered, and in the course of the next twenty or thirty years, all the property was alienated with the exception of Erlestoke, where William Brouncker, the heir, retired with his wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Dauntesey. Meanwhile, Place House was occupied for ten or eleven years by Henry Brouncker’s widow and her second husband, Ambrose Dauntesey. After their death, in 1612, the house apparently was occupied by the steward, and afterwards it was conveyed to Sir John Danvers, who married into the family, in 1634. Danvers died in 1655 and the lordship of Melksham passed to his son, who then conveyed the estate to Walter Long the Younger, of Whaddon. The lordship remained in the Long family, who were descended from the first Henry Brouncker, until the early part of the 20th century, having passed to the 1st Viscount Long of Wraxall. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Melksham」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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