Malmesbury has all the features expected of an ancient county town – a market cross, a ruined abbey and a permanent traffic jam. It is also the place which readers of In search of England most often recommend as a perfect example of past and present merging to tell the story of this sceptred isle.
A day's visit makes it easy to understand what they mean. The old cloth mill, the refuge of Francis Hill when he fled from the Luddite loom breakers in Bradford-on-Avon, is now what estate agents call 'luxury accommodation', but the weir still races under the Avon Bridge as it did when William Cobbett made his rural ride through Wiltshire in 1826.
Cobbett described the great south porch of Malmesbury Abbey as 'the most beautiful thing I have ever seen' and used the marvel of its Saxon carving to prove that the Dark Ages were not as gloomy as people thought.
But he had not travelled to Wiltshire just to confirm his theory that what men call progress is really degeneration. He wanted proof that the local clergy lied to Parliament about the size of the congregations.
He did not suspect that pride prompted them to exaggerate the pulling power of their sermons. On the contrary. He believed the clergy wilfully underestimated the number of people who occupied their Sunday pews.
The Rev Neil Archer, the vicar of Malmesbury but once a principal tenor at Covent Garden, explained why his predecessors might have been tempted to falsify their statistics.
To this day, Church of England parishes are required to keep records of both their formal membership (called the electoral roll) and the weekly attendance at services. The figures are then supplied to the Bishop's Office together with an estimate of likely annual income.
Rich parishes are required to subsidise the poor. The miscreant clergy whose deceit Cobbett aimed to expose wanted to keep the parish income for themselves. So they lied about its size.
Malmesbury – as big as it is beautiful – was not on Corbbett's list of offenders. He merely used the town as a base from which to hunt down the offenders. So we must assume that then, as now, the parish paid its proper dues.
Reasonably enough, Mr Archer was unwilling to reveal his church's annual income. But he did explain that, with an electoral roll and a weekly attendance of about 250, he is expected (and gladly agrees) to help meet the cost of three inner-city churches in Bristol.
The abbey has other bills to pay, not least those for its upkeep of its extraordinary fabric. It relies, in no small part, on the generosity of visitors who come in search of history. And Malmesbury has history in abundance.
But the tourists' enthusiasm has to be fuelled by devoted guides, Friends of the Abbey. Ron Bartholomew, a retired British Airways training manager, is perhaps not altogether typical. He has made himself the undisputed expert in the abbey's history. But he represents, in concentrated form, the spirit that keeps English heritage alive. He loves Malmesbury Abbey.
Men like him make the past come alive. When he explained that, once, the Abbey had a spire 30 feet higher than that of Salisbury Cathedral, he could not disguise his pride. But he was clearly delighted that it had been demolished by lightning.
His pleasure, surprising at first, was justified. In its original state, it would have been destroyed by Henry VIII. What lightning left remains intact and very like it was a thousand years ago.
Athelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great, with claims to be the first King of all England, lies buried in the abbey, and from the top of its tower Brother Elmer strapped on home-made wings and tried, with a remarkable degree of success, to prove man could fly. He fell to earth after 200 yards because of 'the violence of the wind and consciousness of his own rashness'.
Elmer's story was recorded by William of Malmesbury. The abbey was also home to England's great medieval historian.
Abbeys, even in ruins, are best seen from the outside. At the east end of Malmesbury, three great ivy-covered pillars stand to mark what was once the sanctuary.
On the other side of a crude wall – obviously constructed in haste by medieval masons – there is what was left of the abbey after the lightning struck.
From its pulpit Neil Archer still preaches the word of God as it has been preached in Malmesbury since before the Norman Conquest. Since then, the Bible and the prayer book have changed. Attitudes towards religion have altered. A new morality holds sway.
But, as the vicar of Malmesbury points out, the abbey has survived in the service of the town. Much of what it does, it has done since the Benedictines first came to the town. The churches of England merge past into present.
They are England's story in wood, glass and stone.
