Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/249

 io" s. ii. SEPT. 10, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

201

LONDON, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1901,.

CONTENTS.-No. 37.

NOTES -.High Peak Words, 201 Cowper Letters, 203- Cawood Family Pin Witchery, 205 Nicholas Morton- Tiffin' Barnaby Rudge ': Two Slips Lockhart's ' Spanish Ballads,' 20d-Khaki -Principal Tulliedeph, 207.

QUERIES : Grievance Office: John Le Keux Morland and Corfe Castle Glad win Family, 207 Audience Meadow Jane Stuart Authors of Quotations Wanted Jersey Wheel Thomas Tany, 208 J. Hanson Missing London Skatues St. Thomas Wohope Disproportion of Sexes- Bread for the Lord's Day, 209.

REPLIES : Pitt Club, 210 Duchess Sarah, 211 Port Arthur Pilgrims' Ways" Lanarth," 212 Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., 213 Waggoner's Wells -"Kaboose"" Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool" FitzGerald Bibliography, 214 Fotheringay Parish Clerk, 215 Vaccination and Inoculation Silk Men : Silk Throwsters, 216 Whitsunday, 217 "Vine" Tavern, Mile End, 218.

JfOTES ON BOOKS : Copinger's 'County of Suffolk' King's ' Classical and Foreign Quotations ' Samuel Butler's ' Essays ' ' Great Masters ' ' Yorkshire Notes and Queries ' ' Burlington 'Reviews and Magazines.

Notices to Correspondents.

HIGH PEAK WORDS.

DURING the last two summers I have spent some months in a part of the High Peak of Derbyshire which is rich in old words. The village of Little Hucklow, where I have a privilege & term which will be explained further on is about two miles from Tides- well. It is described in Domesday as waste, not because it was desolated by William the Conqueror, but because the land was then untilled, as much of it is still. We are a thousand feet above the sea level ; only a few acres are ploughed, the rest being grass or moorland. Lead - mining, which had been carried on in this neighbourhood from the Roman occupation, has decayed of late years, owing to the importation of foreign lead. The miners' houses have decayed also ; only the farmsteads have escaped the general ruin. The soil is a thin, black mould ; the subsoil is unfertile and brown, and is called fox-earth. Beneath the subsoil are limestone rocks. There are lows or barrows on all sides, with here and there a great white heap of spar or refuse from the mines, called feeth, possibly a variant of filth*

Nearly every old or middle-aged man that you meet has been a lead-miner. These men


 * Cp. stercuafwi, and scoria.

love to talk of their earlier days and of a craft which abounded in old words. For instance, there is the word ling. According to Tapping's glossary, *' bine/ or round ore is the Derbyshire mining term for the purer, richer, and cleaner part of the fell or boose," and "king-place or bing-stead is the ware- house or repository to which the bing is brought in order to undergo the operations of the crushing mill." The fact, however, is that a bing is a semicircular building, pro- jecting from one of the gables, and sometimes from one of the sides, of a miner's coe or cabin. It has a lean-to roof, is without a window, and opens into the cabin as a chancel opens into the nave of a church. In a word, it is a rudimentary apse, into which the miner, in sorting out his ore, threw the pees, or richer pieces of lead. Not one of the quondam lead-miners to whom I have men- tioned the word knows it in the sense of " round ore," or any kind of ore, and they seem amused when I suggest such a meaning. It is possible that elsewhere in Derbyshire the sense of u apse " or recess may have been transferred to the material in the recess.

Another common mining word is lew. A lew is an instrument used for separating the particles of lead from the refuse with which they are mixed. One might compare it to a sieve if it had not a canvas bottom. When the lew is moved backwards and forwards the lighter particles rise to the top, as cream does in a separator, and the lead goes to the bottom. The man who did this work was called a leiver, and the process itself lewing. The inlets or notches on the barrel of a windlass which keep the chain from slipping are known as crumps.

The land on which a house stands, in- cluding the garden, even if the garden be on the other side of the road, is called a

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house would be all the better for "a little more privilege." In this part of Derbyshire, known as the King's Field, any man could follow a vein of lead across any other man's ground,

But churches, houses, gardens, all are free From this strange custom of the minery.*

Hence the privilege seems to have been a messuage or house-plot which was sacred from the invasions of the miners. However, when the land was waste only house-plots could have been held in several ownership.


 * Manlove's 'Liberties and Customes,' &c., 1653,

! 7.