Till the breaking out of the civill warres, Tom ô Bedlam’s did travell about the countrey. They had been poore distracted men that had been putt into Bedlam, where recovering to some sobernesse they were licentiated to goe a begging: e. g. they had on their left arm an armilla of tinn, printed in some workes, about four inches long; they could not gett it off. They wore about their necks a great horn of an oxe in a string or bawdrie, which, when they came to an house for almes, they did wind: and they did putt the drink given them into this horn, whereto they did putt a stopple. Since the warres I doe not remember to have seen any one of them. (I have seen them in Worcestershire within these thirty years, 1756. MS. NOTE, ANONYMOUS.) [This account of the “bedlam beggars” so well known to our forefathers, is repeated by Aubrey in his “Remains of Gentilism,” (Lansdowne MSS. No. 231,) portions of which have been printed in Mr. Thoms’s Anecdotes and Traditions (1839). The passage corresponding with the above is quoted by Mr. Charles Knight from the manuscript referred to, in illustration of the character of “Mad Tom,” assumed by Edgar, in Shakspere’s play of King Lear.—J. B.] CHAPTER V. ARTS: LIBERALL AND MECHANICK. CRICKLAD, a market and borough town in this county, was an University before the Conquest, where were taught the liberall arts and sciences, as may appeare by the learned notes of Mr. Jo. Selden on Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, and by a more convincing and undenyable argument out of Wheelock’s translation of Bede’s History. This University was translated from hence to Oxford. But whereas writers swallow down the old storie that this place takes its name from certain Greek philosophers, who, they say, began here an university, it is a fond opinion. [Aubrey here quotes Fuller as to the etymology of the names of Cricklade and Lechlade. That author, on the authority of Leland, had asserted in his Church History that the one was originally called Greek—lade, and the other Latin—lade, from “two schooles, famous both for eloquence and learning”, which existed there anterior to the Conquest. But, on the report of his “worthy friend Dr. Peter Heylin,” he afterwards stated in his Worthies that “Cricklade was the place for the professors of Greek; Lechlade for physick (Leech being an old English word for a physitian), and Latton, a small village hard by, the place where Latin was professed.” It will be seen by the next sentence that Aubrey disputes even the amended theory of Fuller, and, with more probability, derives the names of the towns in question from words indicating the natural features of the localities.—J. B.]