Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/305

 ieo-s.iv.SKFT.23,1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 251 in 'Emblems of Saints ' (third edition, 1882), quotes the following canonized persons who have the wheel for their symbol: SS. Catherine, Donatus, Euphemia, Encra- tida, Quintin, and Willigis. In Parker's 'Glossary of Terms' (1869), under ' Window,' we read :— " An elegant form, not uncommon in cathedrals and large churches in the Middle Ages, is called a rose window. It is circular, the mullions converg- ing towards the centre, like the spokes of a wheel; hence the name Catherine or wheel window, some- times given to it." HARRY HEMS. Fair Park, Exeter. Since the martyrdom of St. Catherine, who was put to death by torture on a revolving wheel for her public confession of Christianity, the wheel has been generally regarded as an emblem of a continuous faith. I have also heard it described as the emblem of a stead- fast faith, throwing out a radiancy of bright- ness by its revolutions in the midst of darkness and doubt; hence the wheel windows in our churches and the Catherine-wheel fireworks, formerly so popular at village church festivals. Dr. Brewer gives the wheel as the emblem of several saints in addition to St. Cathe- rine. Mr. Arthur Young, in his ' Axial-Polarity of Man's Word-Embodied-Ideasand its Teach- ings' (Kegan Paul & Co., 1887), draws up a system of philosophy which is described throughout by means of diagrams of wheels. The axis of the diagram wheel bears the name of a central idea ; the spokes, the quali- ties connected with it; and the outer circle those evolved from the connexion, the direc- tion of the revolution being indicated by means of arrows — certainly an ingenious adaptation of the Christian emblem to the evolution of Positivist ideas. Q. YAKROW BALDOCK. There is a long but interesting extract on ' Praying by Machinery' in the Christian Remembrancer, cxxviii., taken from Egerton's 'Tour through Spiti.' A description of the 'Japanese Praying Wheel' is given in Sunday at Home for 1858. EVERARD HOME GOLEM AN. 71, Brecknock Road. GIBBKTS (10th S. iv. 229).—By the Hindhead local tradition of my day (forty to fifty years ago), the cross was placed on the spot where a sailor was murdered. D- The gibbet with the grotesque head is evidently the one known as "Willie Winter's 8tob,:> standing on the moorland to the south Elsdon, a village situated near Morpeth, Northumberland. It appears that a little >ver a century ago a man named William Winter, a broom maker and hawker, together with some women of the gang to which he belonged, murdered an old woman named Margaret Crozier at a place called the Kaw, near Elsdon. The circumstantial evidence upon which Winter was convicted lay chiefly n the fact that llobert Hindmarsh, a shep- herd boy, had noticed and counted the number and curious arrangement of the nails in his shoes, and had also been struck by the shape of the knife with which he was eating his lunch in the sheepfold on the day preceding that of the murder. As the description given by Hindmarsh ot the peculiar arrangement of the nails corre- sponded with that of the footprints dis- covered on the scene of the murder, Winter was arrested. After lying in Newcastle Jail for about a year, he and his accomplices were tried and condemned. They were hung upon the Town Moor, Winter confessing his guilt. The body of the murderer was then carried to Elsdon Moor, and hung in chains on the gibbet which overlooks the scene of the murder and can be seen from a long distance around. ,. . As the body dropped to pieces the shep- herds buried the fragments on the moor, and when it had entirely disappeared a frighttui effigy in wood was hung up to remind the country-side of the murderer's doom. 1ms, too, in the course of time fell to pieces ; and now the figure of a Moor's head, erected by the late Sir Walter Trevelyan, dangles in its place. W. B. GERISH. Bishop's Stortford. On the Old North Road (Ermyne Street), about one mile north of the village ot Caxton, and a few yards south of the junction with the road from Cambridge to St. Neots, in a bleak and lonely spot, Caxton Gibbet is still to be seen. E. W. ±5. About the middle of the eighteenth century three men who robbed the North mail near the Chevin, over against Belper, werei all executed and hung in chains on one gibbet on the top of the mountain, and it is recorded that a friendly hand set fire one night to the gibbet, which, with all three bodies well satu- rated with pitch, was burnt to ashes, leaving only the irons and chains remaining. U ne Antiquary, November, 1890, quoted in ' Hanging in Chains,' by Albert Hartshorne, 18AtPthe'beginning of the last century the stone platform whereon the Ualitax