Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:
The Co-operative buildings end this side [north side] of the Market Place at North Row or Meeting House Lane. This was once the site of the King’s Arms (not to be confused with another inn, with the same name, in Weymouth Street). The old King’s Arms, on the corner of Meeting House Lane, was used as a source of Warminster charities. King’s Charity, named after a London silk merchant called William King, first decreed that the rents of all his lands in Warminster should be divided among four deserving persons, who should not receive any other alms. These lands produced forty shillings a year in 1772. William King died in 1769.
After the Enclosure Awards of 1783, allotments in Chedlanger Field, near Brick Hill, were awarded to the Churchwardens and Overseers in lieu of the former lands and let at six pounds a year. For many years this sum was divided among fifteen men at eight shillings each, altered in 1833 to ten shillings each for twelve persons and paid on St. Stephen’s Day. This charity was not actually paid out at the King’s Arms, but the original source of King’s Charity was derived “from tenements or houses thereunto belonging known by the name of the King’s Arms Warminster.”
Slade’s Charity was payable out of the King’s Arms inn, when “twenty poor housekeepers of the Parish, who received nothing of the collection for the Poor,” received twenty half-crowns around 15th January every year. William Slade died in 1723, and a rent-charge of fifty shillings “on a freehold property situate at the entrance of Meeting House Lane” was distributed as Slade’s Charity at Christmas.