Wiltshire is a historic county of south-west England, bounded by Berkshire to the north-east and east, Hampshire to the south-east, Somerset to the south-west, and Gloucestershire to the north-west and north. Eighteenth-century surveys measured it at fifty-four miles long and thirty-eight broad, some 876,000 acres divided into twenty-nine hundreds, with twenty-four market towns and a population of some 168,000, remarkable for returning no fewer than thirty-four members to Parliament from its many boroughs, including the famously depopulated 'rotten borough' of Old Sarum. The county divides into three bands: hilly, wooded country in the north; rich, fertile land in the south; and, at its centre, the open chalk downland of Salisbury Plain, whose close turf provided some of the best sheep pasture in England.
Wiltshire's economy rested heavily on wool and the cloth trade, its downland flocks feeding a substantial clothing industry in towns such as Trowbridge and Devizes, while the valleys between the downs produced abundant corn and rich water meadows. The county's quarries at Chilmark, on the banks of the Nadder, yielded a fine building stone used for Salisbury Cathedral itself and prized for producing exceptionally large, flawless blocks.
Salisbury Cathedral, with the tallest spire in England, dominated the county's ecclesiastical architecture, while Wiltshire's true fame among antiquarians rested on its extraordinary prehistoric monuments: Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, already the subject of learned speculation about its builders and purpose, and the vast stone circle and avenues at Avebury, together with the ancient earthwork known as Wansdyke running across the county, gave Wiltshire a concentration of ancient remains unmatched anywhere else in England. Longleat and Wilton House, two of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean houses of England, stood alongside these prehistoric wonders as evidence of the county's long and continuous habitation.