Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/573

. ii. DEC. 10, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

473

Facetious writers in so-called local dialect are of all the most untrustworthy and mis- chievous. Their effusions usually proclaim their ignorance : they are quite unconscious of the wide difference there is between literary and dialectal English. Barnes him- self cannot escape ME. ADDY'S strictures, for his most touching verses are but literary English quaintly spelt.

Rural people are not yet forgetting all their native speech, and close observers off the beaten track will find that modern education is at present making them bilin- gual : that the boys and girls who are being taught to pronounce correctly, and to aspi- rate never so painfully, have quite another kind of speech of their own, particularly as to grammar and syntax, with a very different vocabulary, away from school.

It may interest MR. BARCLAY-ALLARDICE to know that the rows of hay he describes as called ivinroivs in America are known only by that name, i.e., windrows, pronounced ween-reivs, in Somerset to-day.

F. T. ELWORTHY.

SHAKESPEARE'S WIFE (10 th S. ii. 389, 428). The notion that the names of Agnes and Anne were not likely to be confused could never have arisen, if the inquirer had only tried to realize how Agnes was formerly pronounced. Our modern pronunciation is due to the revival of Greek, but in olden times the gn had in French the sound of gn in mignonette ; and, in fact, the French mignon is written minion (pronounced as mini/on) in English. But the English disliked the gn, and usually turned it into simple n, as in consign, malign, designer. Similarly Agnes (properly pronounced Anyes) was turned into Aneys or Anys, both of which are common.

The fact is not recondite ; I found an example in a few minutes. In ' Fifty Earliest English Wills,' ed. Furnivall (E.E.T.S.), p. 92, a man appoints his " wyiff Anneys " as his executor ; and on p. 93 we read *' commissa- que fuit administratio Agneti, relicte eiusdern." The date is 1432-3.

WALTER W. SKEAT.

The quotation from the late Mr. Elton's book on Shakespeare is delightfully incon- clusive. After proving that Anne and Agnes were, in quite early times, so commonly interchanged that it became necessary to guard against any miscarriage of justice likely to arise from the confusion between them, the author goes on : *' The suggestion may therefore be dismissed, that the poet married, under the name of Anne, an Agnes

Hathaway." His evidence points rather to- the opposite conclusion. The next sentence quoted is even more curious, and amounts to this: ''If there were no evidence of Shake- speare's wife being a Hathaway, then would it be somewhat difficult to prove it. : ' O learned judge ! Lastly, Mr. Elton says : " There is, we may say, no reasonable doubt that Anne belonged to a Gloucestershire family." This is a mere ipse dixit, and flatly contradicted by Mrs. C. C. Stopes, who, in her 'Shakespeare's Family,' p. 87, says : " The- Hathaways from whom Anne Shakespeare- descended have not been proved to be of the Gloucestershire stock." REGINALD HAINES. Uppingham.

STEP-BROTHER (10 th S. i. 329, 395, 475 ; iL 38). MR. T. WILSON asks at the second reference, How came the word beau to be- used in the sense of step-brother and brother- in-law 1 Biaus, belle, are adjectives of en- dearment of the most general use in Old French when some one addresses a person, whether relative, friend, or stranger, to whom he or she wants to show affection, the terms thus being an equivalent of the modern cher, chere :

" Je morrai ja," dist la pucelle,

" Se plus me dites tel noyele,

Biaus pere, que je vous oi dire." ' La Chastelaine de Saint Gille,' 11. 10-12.

Ele respond! : " Biaus douz sire,

Je n'oae mon pere desdire."

Ibid., 122-3.

Se Ii a dit : "Biaus tres douz frere,

Quel besoing vous ameua ca?"


 * Du Chevalier au Barisel,' 11. 708-10.

"Frere," fet il, " biaus douz amis."

Ibid., 881.

The reason that the word has been re- stricted to connexions may lie in the wish to meet the newly won relations with special heartiness, and so to remove that natural feeling of uneasiness prevailing between in- dividuals till then unknown to one another, and suddenly thrown together by circum- stances. But this psychological process deserves a study by itself.

In Wolfram von Eschenbach's great epic poem 'Parzival' the young hero, who has been brought up by his mother intentionally in utter ignorance of knighthood, breaks away from home as soon as he has met with knights. He does not even know his name* and when asked for it by Sigune, a lady whom he encounters on his first ride, gives as such the endearing appellation by which his mother used to call him : " Bon fils, cher fils, beau fils." This is at the same time an interesting proof of how widely spread the knowledge of French must have been in