chippenham

Chippenham is a market town and civil parish in north-west Wiltshire, England. It lies 13 miles (21 km) north-east of Bath, 86 miles (138 km) west of London and is near the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town was established on a crossing of the River Avon, where some form of settlement is believed to have existed since before Roman times. It was a royal vill and probably a royal hunting lodge, under Alfred the Great. The town continued to grow when the Great Western Railway arrived in 1841. In 2021 the parish had a population of 36,548.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the town as Cippanhamme: this could refer to a person called Cippa who had his hamm, an enclosure in a river meadow. An alternative theory suggests that the name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word ceap, meaning 'market'. The name is recorded variously as Cippanhamm (878), Cepen (1042), Cheppeham (1155), Chippenham (1227), Shippenham (1319) and Chippyngham (1541). In John Speed's map of Wiltshire (1611), the name is spelt both "Chippenham" (for the hundred) and "Chipnam" (for the town).