Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/393

 ii s. i. MAY 14, mo.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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later Stradiot mercenaries, as the many equestrian monuments in the churches there suggest. Likely enough, these were imported from Hungary and Germany. Sanudo says of Doge Marco Celsi (1361) that he entered Venice with twelve nobles all mounted, and that he boasted the pos- session of the finest stud in the city of course, saving that of St. Mark. The war- steeds of the Delia Scala at Verona, and of the Visconti at Milan, were closely related. But none of the horses on their monuments suggest speed and nimbleness so much as strength and pride. It would, therefore, seem probable that the citizens of Venice were familiar with at least three types of horse in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, i.e., those of St. Mark, those of Peloponnesus, and those of the Lombard breed. An extremely cold winter in 1491 banished all the gondolas frOm the canals, and the Grand Canal being set fast in ice, the Stradiots held a tournament in sight of all Venice, ' ' correndo per giuco a cavallo con le loro lancie 1'uno contro all' altro " (cf. Bembo, ' Storia Veneta,'- 1. i.), a truly unique event ! ST. CLAIR BADDELEY.

YEOVIL GOLDEN TORQUE. In the May of 1909 there was found at Yeovil, not far from Glastonbury, one of those beautiful ancient British collars called torques, i.e., made of three pure golden rods twisted round each other to form one golden rope. The Yeovil torque is small, apparently for a female neck, and it appears to have been lost, not buried, and is now deposited in the Taunton Museum safe, an exact metal copy being placed in the show-case. The Curator of the Museum sent a learned description to The Somerset County Gazette, and has since written an exhaustive paper on it, which has been published in the Somerset Archaeological Society's Transactions. Archaeologists date it ante B.C. 500.

These golden torques have been found in England, Wales, Ireland, France, &c., but their extreme antiquity seems hardly to be generally noticed.

When Pharaoh promoted Joseph to be viceroy over Egypt, he installed him into his high office by placing a golden torque on his neck (Genesis xli. 42). In the Authorized Version it is called a chain. But the original Hebrew word is rabeed, which means a twisted neck-collar or torque (Archceologia, xxvii. 8-12).

Dr. Parkhurst gives the same meaning to rabeed, describing it as "a wreathen collar for the neck, "or torque ('Hebrew Lexicon,"

1813, p. 670). St. Jerome also translates it in the Vulgate by " torquem auream. n Fosbroke, speaking of torques, says : "As marks of honour, they are ancient indeed, for Joseph was thus decorated, and the torques also- occur among the Greeks, Gauls, Britons."' Ency- clopaedia of Antiquities,' 1825, vol. i. p. 296.

Joseph therefore was invested with a golden torque, such as British chiefs wore.

Ezekiel refers to the wealth of Jerusalem,, speaking of her as having ' ' a torque on thy neck" (Ezekiel xvi. 11), for the same word rabeed is here used, and the Vulgate has " torquem. ' ? So Zedekiah, the last Jewish king, and his nobles, wore golden torques.

Belshazzar, in the palace of Babylon, invested Daniel with a golden torque for explaining the writing on the wall (Daniel v. 29), for the Vulgate has here also " torques aurea."

The golden torque, after its adoption in Egypt, seems to have been introduced by the Hebrews into Palestine.

In B.C. 361 Manlius slew a huge Gaulish chief, and appropriated his large gold torque, being nicknamed in consequence Manlius Torquatus ; and so introduced the golden torque among the Romans. In Persia the regiment of *' Immortals n wore it.

M. A.

STICKE : HISTORY OF THE GAME. I subjoin a cutting from The Times of 14 April which seems to deserve record in your valuable periodical :

THE GAME OF STICKE.

To the Editor of The Times.

SIR, Now that a " stick 6 " court has been duly inaugurated at the Queen's Club, it may interest some of your readers to know the origin of the game and the reason of its rather bizarre name. As I had the honour of building the first stick6 court, and am more or less the inventor and originator of the game, I can speak with some authority on both subjects.

In the early sixties my half-brother, the late Mr. Julian Marshall (the author of ' The Annals of Tennis ' and a fine player himself), improvised a tennis court in a paved backyard in our home in Yorkshire. The roof of a line of low sheds served for a penthouse, the paving-stones, as in monastic times, marked our chases, the upper portion of a door was our grille, three pigsties bhe dedans, there was a superfluity of tambours,, and " chase the poultry -yard door," " worse than bhe second pigsty " (the winning gallery was the last pigsty on the hazard side), gave local colour to the marking. It made a good game and taught me to cut the ball.

When lawn tennis was first introduced into England it was given the name of " Sphaeri- sticke," and was played in a court which dimin- ished in breadth from the base line, hour-glass fashion, to a waist at the net. Soon after its-