Lacock in Wiltshire is an abbey village; astonishingly well built, and well preserved, and now a property like West Wycombe (p. 51) of the National Trust. The abbey was founded on the Avon meadowland by Ela, widow of William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury (whose tomb can be seen in the nave of Salisbury Cathedral), in 1230. She owned the manor and advowson of Lacock which she gave to her new foundation of Augustinian Canonesses; and in 1240 she herself became the first abbess. A last proprietor of the abbey, which passed to the Talbot family not a great while after the abbey had been dissolved, was Miss Matilda Talbot, who in 1950 gave the remnant of the abbey buildings (long since turned into a mansion by her ancestors) and all of the village (which her ancestors had rebuilt), and the Manor Farm, to the National Trust. The abbey—or rather Lacock House or those parts of it which were not themselves medieval—were very charmingly Gothicized in the eighteenth century; and it was here that the inventor William Fox Talbot (1806-1877) conducted his experiments in photography.

The ancient village of Lacock enlarged itself outside the gates of the abbey. For one thing Lacock had been part of the Forest of Melksham; and was disafforested on the foundation of the abbey. For another thing, its foundress also obtained the grant of a fair at Lacock. There was local building-stone for walls and mullions, there was timber for frame walls and many of the villagers were given new houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; since when hardly a finger has been laid on the village. A unity of age and tone give Lacock a quite extraordinary air of the past.