Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/475

 10* 8. L MAY 14,1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

391

February. But by the old Julian reckoning (still observed in the Eastern Church) 1 Janu- ary this year was a Thursday and the first Sunday was 4 January, so that D was the Sunday Letter till the end of February ; from the beginning of March (and therefore in the tabular guide to Easter) it was C. As I remarked before, taking this as the Sunday or Dominical Letter and 5 as the Golden Number, we find in the table 28 March (corresponding to the Gregorian 10 April) for Easter Day. W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

KENTISH CUSTOM ON EASTER DAY (10 th S- i. 324). In the Reliquary for January, 1900, is a paper about the Biddenden Maids by Mr. George Clinch. At the Canterbury Probate Office I have examined the Index of Wills proved in the Archdeacon's Court and Con- sistory Court, and there is no name of Chulkhurst.

The following presentment from Bid- denden at the visitation of the Archdeacon of Canterbury in 1605 possibly refers to this custom :

"52 was not observed on the last Easter day. For there hath been a custom with us that on that day our parson giveth and causeth to be delivered unto the parishioners bread, cheese, cakes, and clivers barrels of beer, brought in there and drawn, not without much disorder by reason of some unruly ones, which at such a time we cannot restrain with any ease." Vol. Ixii. fol. 150.

The " 52 " evidently refers to the question of inquiry, not preserved with the volumes in the Cathedral Library at Canterbury.

ARTHUR HUSSEY.

Tankerton-on-Sea, Kent.

HUGO'S ' LES ABEILLES IMPERIALES ' (10 th S. i. 348). The poem is entitled 'Le Manteau Imperial,' ana is to be found in the'Chati- naents,' livre v. poeme 3. J. R.

[MR. A. HAMONET and H. G. L. S. are thanked for similar information.]

RIVER DIVIDED (10 th S. i. 289). From vol. i. (1801) of the ' Beauties of England and Wales,' p. 81, 1 cull the following. It will be observed that Snelson and Harrold are the names of the villages mentioned, instead of Suelstone and Harwood as quoted by ASTARTE :

" Walsingham relates a singular circumstance concerning the river Ouse, which on the 1st of January, in the year 1399, suddenly ceased to flow between the villages of Snelson and Harrold, near Bedford, leaving its channel so bare of water, that people walked at the bottom for full three miles. Various explications have been given of this remark- able phenomenon ; but the opinion that it was a portent of the divisions and dire wars, which the claims of the rival houses of York and Lancaster shortly afterwards occasioned, seems to have ob-

tained most credit in that age of superstitious credulity. Dr. Childrey endeavours to account for it by supposing that the stream upward was con- gealed by a sudden frost ; yet very little considera- tion enables us to determine that this conjecture is untenable. What the real cause was cannot, perhaps, at this distance of time, be discovered ; but as the reasons hitherto assigned have proved unsatisfactory, we shall offer a suggestion that appears to us more deserving of belief. Might not the earth have sunk in some part of the channel, and admitted the waters into an extensive cavity, which having filled, the river resumed its course, and again flowed within its accustomed bed ?"

CHAS. F. FORSHAW, LL.D., F.R.Hist.S. Bradford.

Capgrave mentions this phenomenon under the year 1398, not 1399 :--

"In the xxii yere [i.e. of Richard II. 's reign], in the fest of Circumcision, a depe watir in Bedforth- schire, that rennyth betwix Snelleston and Harles- woode, sodeynly stood stille, and departed him on- to othir place ; and the ry ver, that was wete before, stood drye tlire myle o length, that men myte go ovyr. This merveyle betokned, men seide, gret dyvysion that schuld falle." See 'The Chronicle of England,' by John Capgrave, Rolls Series, 1858, p. 268.

A. T. C. CREE.

Brodsworth, Beckenham.

There is an old Cambridgeshire proverb, mentioned by Fuller, in allusion to the inun- dations of the Ouse : " The bailiff of Bedford is coming." This river, when swollen with rain, &c., in the winter, "arrests the Isle of Ely with an inundation, bringing down suddenly abundance of water," and on these occasions the Ouse, as Lysons says, is "a most rapacious distrainer of hay and cattle." The river divides the county of Bedford in two parts, and in the year 1256 the town of Bedford suffered great injury from one of these sudden inundations, and again in 1570. But with regard to the account of the par- ticular event of 1399 it is attributed by Lysons, in his 'Magna Britannia,' to the fifteenth - century monk and chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who says that "the course of the Ouse, between Harold in Bed- fordshire, and Snelston in Buckinghamshire, was suddenly changed, and a dry channel left for the length of three miles." Walsing- ham is the principal authority, for the reigns of Richard II., Henry IV., and Henry V., for many historical incidents not to be met with in other writers, but Lysons does not, in the edition referred to of his ' Magna Britannia ' (1813, vol. i. part i.), allude to any prophetic interpretation which was placed upon the eventby Walsingham. Dugdale in his ' British Traveller,' however, says that it \yas regarded as presaging the subsequent civil war, while