Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/164

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. i. FEB. 13, im,

at Orvieto was reputed to be the portal of Purgatory. In that case a reference or allusion to the fact might be confidently expected in Dante, who, in all likelihood, was acquainted with an early form of the St. Patrick legend. The absence of such an allusion, which would have been penned a couple of centuries before the younger Antonio di Sangallo began operations, favours another view. Alexander VI. is stated to have abolished the revenues arising from the pilgrimages to the islet, in the Donegal Lough Derg in 1497. Taken in conjunction with this, and with the widely received account of St. Patrick's journey through Purgatory, the Orvieto dedication certainly looks like an attempt to give the Irish legend a new local habitation, and incidentally, I suppose, to orvietanize the pagan king whom St. Patrick so adroitly conveyed to warmer regions than he himself cared to visit. J. DORMER.

FITZHAMON (10 th S. i. 47). G. H. W. asks whether Hamo or Hamon was a common Norman Christian name. It was not among the most popular, but cannot be said to have been uncommon. I have met with it pretty often. The following three examples occur in Mr. I. H. Jeayes's ' Catalogue of the Berkeley Charters.' There are probably others in the same volume: Charter executed at Bristol in 1153, witnessed by "Willelmus filius Hamonis" (2) ; quitclaim of the time of Richard I., witnessed by Hamo de Valoune (21) ; grant of the time of Henry III., wit- nessed by Hamo Peverel (111).

EDWARD PEACOCK.

The following extract from a pedigree oi Alen by Sir William Hawkins, Ulster, 1785, quoted in a paper of mine on the Alens oi St. Wolstan's in the Kildare Archseologica" Society's Journal, July, 1903, may be of use to G. H. W. :

" The Genealogy of the Alens of Saint Wolstan's of the Lineal Descent of Sir John Alen, Banneret who came into England with William the Con queror, Duke of Normandy, originally descendec and deriving his Pedigree from the Dukes of Nor mandy. As pr. account of Sir Thomas Hawley principal Herald and King of Arms of England ir the eighth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, in the Annals of England. Sir John Alen was nephew to Robert Fitzhammon and Richarc de Granville, and was with them at the Great Battl

of Hastings in Sussex The Conqueror afterward

bestowed on Richard de Granville the Lordship o Beddiford, with other large possessions in Devon

shire He did also inherit his father's Honours in

Normandy. His brother Fitzhammon being kille in France, where he was sent by King Henry I st a his Chief General, & also upon Sir John Alen, th Conqueror bestow'd for his great services larg

possessions in the counties of Norfolk, Cornwall, nd Westmoreland in fee."

H. L. L. DENNY.

MILESTONES (10 th S. i. 7). Our milestone has undoubtedly descended to us from the milliarium which the Romans placed along the sides of their principal roads, in the manner still customary in this country, and with the respective distances from the city nscribed upon them, reckoned at intervals of a thousand paces (our mile) apart. The custom, says Rich, was first introduced by 3. Gracchus i.e., the Roman custom. Rich, m his 'Greek and Roman Antiquities,' gives an illustration representing an original Roman milestone, which stood in 1873 on the Capitol, but originally marked the first mile from Rome, as indicated by the numeral I. on the top of it. It is in the form of a column. Pliny says the miles on the Roman roads were distinguished by a pillar, or a stone, set up at the end of each of them, and marked with one or more figures denoting how far it was from the golden milestone, the milliarium aureum, which was erected by Augustus at the top of the Roman Forum (see Tacitus, 'Hist.,' bk. i. ch. xxvn.) to mark the point at which all the great military roads ultimately converged. For accounts of Roman milestones see vol. vni. of Archceologia (1785), p. 85 ; Montfaucon's 'Antiquite Expliquee; Archceologia, vol. xxvu., p. 404 ; and the Antiquary, Sept., 1883, p. 130. About fifty-six Anglo-Roman milestones have been recorded some with legible inscrip- tions. One of the latest was at Lincoln in the year 1879, which is of the time of Vic- torinus. None has, as yet, been found earlier than Hadrian, or later than Constantino the Younger (A.D. 336). See the Rev. Prebendary Scarth on the 'Roman Milliaria' found m Britain, Arch. Journ., vol. xxxiv. pp. 395-405, and his 'Roman Britain,' pp. 119-23.

Something similar, in the way of a -land- mark, to the gilded pillar in Rome seems to have formerly existed in the City of London. Although there does not seem to be any direct evidence that the Standard in Cornhill occupied the site of a Roman landmark of this nature, yet distances were measured from the Standard, which served the same purpose as the milliarium aureum, and several of our suburban milestones were still in- scribed in Cunningham's time with the numbers of miles "from the Standard Cornhill." There was a Standard in Cornhill as early as 2 Henry V. (' London Chronicle, ed. by Sir N. H. Nicolas, p. 99). The Roman milestones did not, however, invariably give the distances from the Pillar, for some have