Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/181

 10 s. XL FEB. 20, 1909.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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GROOM'S COFFEE-HOUSE. Many old Lon- doners will read with interest the bills announcing the sale of this quaint old coffee-house. For over two centuries Groom's has been the resort of generations of lawyers, and is one of the few links still left between the coffee-houses of the eigh- teenth century and the more pretentious restaurants of our own day. For the last twenty years it has been carried on by Mr. George Rice Bolton, the well-known hotel proprietor, but it has still its old name, and much of its old appearance.

FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.

FLYING MACHINE EST 1751. In connexion with the present remarkable development of balloons, airships, aeroplanes, &c., some early instances have been recorded in the papers and in ' N. & Q.,' but I have not noticed a mention of this one, nor of one so early.

A Jesuit missionary, of the name of Grimaldi, who had been many years in India, and who came from Civitavecchia, is said to have invented a machine for flying. It was in the form of an eagle, and by its aid he was able to fly from Calais, across the Channel, to Dover. This feat he performed in one hour in 1751. See the account of it by Charles Hopf in the ' Encyclopaedia of Arts and Sciences ' by Ersch and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1871, p. 156. I have read the same account in another work.

D. J.

GOOSE WITH THE GOLDEN FEATHERS OUT

BEXCH-ETSTD AT THROCKING. Fairy tales illustrated on bench-ends in churches are not, I believe, of frequent occurrence. One which apparently typifies the above story is to be found on the east end of the seat on the north side of the choir in the secluded little church of Throcking, some two miles from Buntingford, Hertfordshire. Mr. Gordon Hills, the architect who restored the church in 1880, in a letter to the Rector, the Rev. C. Wigan Harvey, said :

" The poppy-head that has the figures upon it is very curious. It is a whimsical lecture on a breach of the Eighth Commandment. If you have at hand Grimm's ' Fairy Tales,' you will find the tale about the golden goose on which it is founded. It is an ancient story in a modern dress. A young wood- cutter who passed for a simpleton ootained the favour of a good spirit by his superior charity and obedience, and was rewarded by finding the goose in the roots of a tree which he felled. Going to an inn for the night, his prize attracted the cupidity of the three daughters of the host, who accordingly figure in the carving, and they wear no dress, because until the break-up of the monas-

teries dispersed their inmates, who had universally by their rules worn night-dresses, and by this dispersion made that custom common, the prac- tice of the laity had always been to wear nothing of a body dress at night. There was no in- delicacy designed or intended by the carver, but by this means he represented a night scene. Well, the young women came by night to take even a feather of the golden goose if they could. First came the elder, and she stuck immovably to the goose, and then came the second, and stuck to her sister; the third sprang to her assistance, and is represented as having made an extraordinary spring on the head of the first. No doubt the shape of the wood partly dictated her strange position. In the morning the simpleton youth rose in the dark to carry off his prize, and was not aware till day- light broke of the extraordinary train that stuck to the goose which he carried under his arm. The carving stops the tale at the arrival of the third sister, out the tale goes on increasing the train as the wondering neighbours tried to release the sisters.

" I wonder myself whether the story had not a really local application. Can it be that the then im- portant little market town of Buntingford was the golden goose hinted at, and the three daughters who stuck to it Throcking, Aspenden, and Lay- ston, in which parishes Buntiugtord stands, each getting a golden feather out of Buntingford? It may be said that Bnntingford is partly in Wyddial, and the introduction of the fourth parish could not fit the fable. By looking at old maps I fancy that Wyddial has even now very little of Buntingford, and that it had 400 years ago nothing."

The market at Buntingford has ceased to exist, but I judge from local seventeenth- century wills in my possession that it was at one period a valuable privilege. The original grant of the market and two fairs by Henry VIII. in 1541 hangs in the chapel of ease at Buntingford. Mr. T. T. Greg printed a translation of it, illustrated by a facsimile, in the East Herts Archaeological Transactions, vol. ii. pp. 1-5.

W. B. GERISH. Bishop's Stortford.

BlRKENHEAD PiLACE - RlME. 1 do not

think that the following rime of places has hitherto found its way into ' N. & Q.' It appeared in The Catholic News, 18 Jan., 1890, p. 7 :

From Birkenhead to Hilburee

A squirrel may go from tree to tree.

COM. LINC.

" IMMANQTJABLE." An English letter written in 1794 by Lafayette (the famous French general who had taken a prominent part in the American War of Independence > contains the strangely imported French ad- jective immanquable (in the sentence " This is certainly immanquable "). The letter, which is followed by a French translation, is printed on pp. 287-9 of ' Correspondence