Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/90

 70 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. iv. JOLV 22,1905. city. Did any Bristol company bear arms as follows ? " Two garbs, a chief chequy, in base a lamb." I can find no family which bore it. These arms appear in the neighbour- hood of Bristol in 1630. G. A. T. Albany, N.Y. [Mr. John Latimer, the historian of Bristol, who died 4 January, 1904, published the previous year, through Arrowsmith of Bristol, ' The History of the Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol, with some Account of the Anterior Merchant Guilds." Our American correspondent is likely to obtain from this work all the informa- tion he needs, as The Athencmm stated on 3 October, 1903: "Mr. Latimer has taken great pains to dis- cover collateral evidence of the rise and develop- ment of the Bristol merchants."] POEM BY SIR THOMAS WYATT.—In reading through Wyatt's poems recently, I was struck with the resemblance of one lyric to a similar piece ascribed to Alexander Scot, the Scottish poet. I have no means of comparing dates at present, but I rather think that Scot preceded Wyatt. The name of the poem referred to is in both writers "Lo! what it is to love." I should be glad if any reader of 4 N. & Q.' would offer an explanation of this curious parallel. W. B. " LONNING." (10th S. iv. 29.) SIXTY years ago, about the year 1845, a small boy from the neighbourhood of London went on a visit to an uncle at Eskrigg, some three miles from Wigton in Cumberland. One morning he strolled through the garden into the lane beyond. The turn to the left led to the high road, and presented no interest; so he turned to the right. The lane was winding and long, and seemed interminable; so that, after observing nothing except a small donkey grazing there, he prudently turned back, and had almost reached the starting- point, when he was suddenly aware of a young girl accompanied by two little brothers, who appealed to him in the enigmatic sen- tence : " Hae ye seen oor coodie doon the lonnin?" Being hopelessly ignorant of the sense of the sentence, he had nothing to say but " No !" Nevertheless, he treasured up the sound of it, made haste back, and burst into the parlour with the cry, " Hae ye seen oor coodie doon the lonnin f What does it mean ? " It was soon explained : the coodie was Cuddie (or Cuthbert), the equivalent of the Southern Neddy, the pet - name for a donkey; and lonnin was the lane. Whereupon the small boy, with a keen sense of self- reproach, said : " Then I told the poor girl a falsehood ! " The lesson was a sharp one, and the small boy returned home with a much- enriched vocabulary, including not only Cuddie and lonnin, but a stee, a cley, a byre, and kye, and many more. Moreover, from that day the idea of acquiring the senses of provincial words and antiquated expressions haunted him (as VVordsworth says) like a passion ; and he lived to found the English Dialect Society, and to direct it till its work was done. And now in the 'English Dialect Dictionary' any reader may find the word loaning, known in eight dialects with something like fifteen variant forms, fully illustrated with a whole column of examples. And still, across the far expanse of fully sixty years, I hear the anxious tones of that fresh Cumbrian voice: " Hae ye seen oor coodie doon the lonnin ?" WALTER W. SKEAT. In the' Scottish Dictionary' Jamieson quotes from ' Cartul. Aberd.' the phrase, " A lonyng lyand throw the mur betwix twa aid stane dykes," explaining that the extract bears upon an agreement of 1446. His definition of the term is "a narrow inclosed way." As a supplementary meaning he gives " The privilege of having a common through which cattle pass to or return from the places of pasture." Under the entry 'Loan, Lone, Lonning,' Jamieson both discusses and illustrates pretty fully. He conjectures that the word is allied to Eng. " lawn," but he shows conclusively that in its most familiar application it is practically an equivalent of "lane." The thing denoted is "An opening between fields of corn, near or leading to the homestead, left uncultivated, for the sake of driving the cattle homewards." The lexi- cographer adds, " Here the cows are fre- quently milked." This explains the reference in Jean Elliot's 'Flowers of the Forest":— I've heard them liltin' at the ewe-milkin', Lasses a-liltin' before the dawn of day ; But now they are moanin' on ilka green loanin'; The Flowers «' the Forest are u' wede away. It also shows how sadly adrift some inter- preter is in the volume of 'Selections from Burns' for which Mr. Andrew Lang stands sponsor. Explaining " the kye stood rowtin' i" the loan," which occurs towards the close of ' The Twa Dogs," Mr. Lang or a coadjutor says that the loan is the milking-shed ! This is manifestly a case of allowing the context to suggest a meaning; it is "in- genious but not correct," as a Greek pro- fessor aforetime sometimes remarked with ambiguous commendation. Jamieson goes