THE ANCIENT BOROUGH OF MALMESBURY, with a Charter dating from King Edward the Elder, can claim to be the oldest Borough in England. The original Charter, dated 924, has long since been lost, but King Athelstan in 936 stated in his Charter, of which a copy is extant in the British Museum, that he confirmed the privileges "as they held them in the time of King Edward, my father, fully and in honour."
It is certain that this ancient place has been inhabited on its rocky eminence, surrounded by river and swamp land, for some three thousand years. Other hill towns nearby, such as Sherston and Purton, have a similar history. The oldest name known, Caer Bladon, which means a "fortified place on the Bladon," indicates that this settlement on the banks of one of the surrounding rivers, then called Bladon, was an established place.
Pre-Roman history is not known, and although the Fosse Way passes about two miles to the North West, with one of the usual methodical "ten mile halts" called Mutantis on the main Bristol Road, no Roman or Romano-British remains have ever been found in the immediate neighbourhood. Mutantis was the second halt after Nettleton, between Bath and Cirencester, and many Roman relics are still to be found there in the woods covering the site. By a strange coincidence the actual site of Mutantis was used as an Italian prison camp during the last war when the ancestors of the Romans actually dug up relics of the past when building the place. Perhaps the educated Romans found the Malmesbury inhabitants rough, tough, illiterate types not worth bothering about and difficult of access. The name "Wylt" (o.e. "the wild") and hence Wiltshire, explains this.
Malmesbury is often confused with Malmsey, of the "Butt of Malmsey" fame, in which the Duke of Clarence met his death in the Tower in 1478. He had been sentenced to death by his brother Edward IV for treachery, and it is alleged he selected death by drowning in a butt of Malmsey, as he loved the sweet and heady wine from the Morea district of Greece. Although we grew wine here in monastic days, and traces of the vineyards can still be seen, there is no connection whatsoever between the town of Malmesbury and the wine Malmsey.
The area did not start to develop until after the invasions of the Saxons at Southampton in 570. After their victory at Dyrham, near Bath, they annexed this area and we became part of the West Saxon, or Wessex, Kingdom comprising Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset.
