Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 10.djvu/133

 10 s. x. AUG. s, loos.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

105

teene pounds eleauen shillings and .... tres of priuie seale and Schedule thereunto annexed, bearing. ..." occurs (among a list of twenty-five tradesmen whose bills amounted in all to 9,014Z.) the entry : " John Shakespeare, Bitmaker, 261. 13s." The largest amount was that of John Shepley " Imbroderer," 1,979Z. 12s. 2d. A discount of about 5 per cent was in most cases deducted from every account, and the " acquittance " (the signature of each of the recipients) was affixed in the last column of the document as an acknowledgment of the receipt of the amount. It would have been interesting to find that of John Shake- speare, but that and many others are wanting.

The document is evidently a waif derived from the mass of Exchequer papers stored about 1790 in a vault in Somerset House, rejected as valueless by the ignorant chief clerk in the Comptroller's Office, and sold to a waste-paper dealer at 31. per ton. The collectors of those days who got wind of the transaction rescued, I believe, many valuable papers from destruction ; but after the fatal blunder was bruited about and had become a public scandal, means were actually taken to destroy the value of the remnant by systematically tearing off portions of each as they were taken from the heap, and to this atrocious treatment must, I am con- fident, be laid the stripping-off of one corner of the leaves of the present document, in which the autograph signature of John Shakespeare, among many others, was contained.

The warrant of Privy Seal was dated 23 March, 1623, but the goods must, it would seem, have been ordered by Charles and Buckingham, unknown to James, for some considerable time before 17 February, when " Tom and John Smith " set off on their romantic journey from Newhall.

J. ELIOT HODGKIN.

[A paper giving many quotations from accounts of John Shakespeare, bitmaker, appeared in The Athenceum of 16 May last, from the pen of Mrs. C. C. Stopes, the well-known Shakespearian autho- rity.]

MCDONALD AND McPlKE FAMILIES. (See

10 S. ii. 467.) In the ' Index to Prerogative Wills of Ireland, 1536-1810,' by Sir Arthur Vicars, F.S.A. (Dublin, 1897), occur these three items :

P. 302, 1790, McDonald, Edmond.

P. 308, 1790, M'Peake, Neale, the elder, Ardnagross, co. Antrim.

P. 377, 1801, Pike, Wright, Dublin city, merchant.

The surname McPike appears several times (circa 1780) in the series entitled ' Pennsylvania Archives,' and a list of those references was printed in The Celtic Monthly, Glasgow (1906), vol. xiv. p. 170. Efforts to trace that patronymic to the Old World, however, have been unsuccessful ; but a letter dated 3 May, 1907, from Mr. Edward McPike of Mako Point, Awhitu, Auckland, New Zealand, addressed to me, contains these remarks :

" My father's name was James McPike. He died

two years ago I have often heard my father say

that he never heard of any McPikes but his rela- tions My father came to New Zealand from

Belfast, Ireland, about sixty years ago."

It is to be supposed, therefore, that from the records of Belfast one might recover some genealogical facts pertaining to the- McPike family before 1847, and possibly before 1772, which is the date of greater interest to me. I should be glad to have the address of a local historian in Belfast.

The name McPike or McPeake, with allied spellings thereof, has also been discussed somewhat in Scottish Notes and Queries, Aberdeen, Second Series, vols. vi. and vii. EUGENE F. McPiKE.

1, Park Row, Chicago.

" EVERGLADE " : ITS DERIVATION. Con- cerning this word the ' N.E.D. remarks : " The formation is irregular, and the in- tended etymological sense uncertain ; per- haps ' ever ' was used to mean intermin- able ' " ; while the ' Century Dictionary ' has no suggestion whatever to offer as to its derivation. It is specifically applied to a wide expanse of marshland, the Everglades- of Southern Florida, efforts to reclaim which for cultivation are, it is said, about to be made.

The 'N.E.D.' gives in full the history of " glade," an open space in a forest, which it connects with Swed. gladas, the setting of the sun ; with Eng. glad, probably from Germ, glatt, smooth ; and with M.E. glode, a place free from brushwood. It is the prefix " ever " that is the stumbling-block. Recollecting Grimm's derivation of Germ. Aberglaube, superstition, from a previously existing word Ueberglaube by modification, I lately suggested in the New York Evening Post, in reply to a question on the subject, that in " everglade " the initial vowel had been modified from overglade, the sense of the prefix evidently denoting extension, as in " overgrowth," and in the Elizabethan verbs " to oversnow " and " to overgrass." The following quotation from Spenser's ' Shepheard's Calendar ' seems to confirm