Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 11.djvu/443

 u s. XL JUNE 5, i9i5.) NOTES AND QUERIES.

433

BARON ADAM FRIEDEL. I should be very glad of some information concerning the life and character of the above. I have some of his letters from the East in the years 1853-5. I ana aware that he travelled extensively in England and Scotland. He was an artist, and I have some specimens of his work in my possession. He published some coloured engravings of Turkish characters. I believe he contributed to The London Illustrated News, but whether letters or sketches I cannot say. He was a Dane, and an officer in the Danish army, and is reported to have been killed in battle. Afterwards his estates were confiscated. Whether this occurred at the time of the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein or not, I cannot say, as he suddenly disappeared, and nothing was heard of him. A few letters were received from him, written on the battle-field, but the letters have been lost, and owing to the death of his daughter (to whom the letters were written) a few years ago, I am unable to obtain any clue to his decease.

His daughter was Miss Sarah Friedel, for some years organist at Trent Park(?) Church, Cock Fosters, near Southgate, London.

Replies may be sent to me direct.

OLIVER GRAHAM.

42, Stanley Road, Church Street, Edmonton.

BIRGIT ROOKE, NINTH ABBESS OF SYON, ELECTED DEC., 1576, DIED 6 JAN., 1593/4. In ' Sir Thomas Coningsby's Journal of the Siege of Rouen,' edited for the first volume of ' The Camden Miscellany ' by John Gough Nichols, at pp. 53, 54, Sir Thomas writes under the date 1 Dec., 1591 :

"This afternoone, to drive awaieidlenes, I wentc to a monasterie of nonnes, about a league and a halfe from our quarter, where we so behaved our selves that we receyved very kynd wellcomes, and a banckett of xx tie severall dyshes of preserved fruits. The abbesse was of the house of Baskeville, a verie goodly gentlewoman, and wore her habyt very neate and properlye ; she is a woman exceeding well-spoken, and of good behavior, but of yeeres meeter for God then for the world. But there was 2 or 3 younger noons, and all gentlewomen of good house, whom I know, if you had sene, you would have pyttyed their loss of tyme ; arid so, having spente 2 or 3 howres there, retorned home to our strawe bed."

The editor has no note on this passage ; but it is now known that the only English religious community in the neighbourhood of Rouen at this time was the Bridgettine Abbey of Syon, the only English religious house which has maintained unbroken continuity from pre-Reformation days to the present hour.

Among Sir Thomas Coningsby's com- panions in arms was Sir Thomas Baskerville, knighted in 1588, who had been one of the four colonels of the army sent to assist the King of Navarre, under Peregrine, Lord Willoughby, in 1589 ; and doubtless it was from Sir Thomas Baskerville that Sir Thomas Coningsby learnt that the Lady Abbess belonged to his house. The Lady Abbess at the time was Birgit Rooke. Unfor- tunately, the Register of the community is lost, and no record of her family and place of birth, &c., survives. All that is known is that her father was one John Rooke. The late Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., thought that probably he was one of the Rookes of Stanton St. John, Oxfordshire. Mr. Gillow, however, thinks that the Abbess ma,y have belonged to the Rookes of Havering in Essex. If her mother was a Herefordshire Baskerville, her father is more likely to have been an Oxfordshire than an Essex man.

I should be very grateful for any record

of a marriage of a Baskerville to a John

Rooke sufficiently early for a daughter of

the marriage to be an elderly woman in 1591.

JOHN B. WAINE WRIGHT.

GEORGE OFFLEY. On the fly-leaf of " Virgidemiarum : Satires in Six Books, by Joseph Hall, of Emanuel College, afterwards Bishop of Exeter and of Norwich, Oxford, 1752," is a well written autograph, " Geo. Offley, Coven t Garden." I do not find the latter name in any dramatica, and should be glad of information. W. B. H.

'THE CHIMNEY-SWEEP'S CHORUS.' Caji any of your readers refer me to the original song thus entitled ? The refrain of it ran : With a ruttock, a cluttock, a wallet, a satchel, rare May Day.

Years ago, when a boy at school, I was familiar with it as a glee, and I am curious to meet with the full words and music, so reminiscent of the " good old days " when our London streets were visited by " Jacks- in-the-Green."

R. T. THOMSON. Kent House, Church End, Finchley, N.

COURAGE, THE BREWER. Where did Courage come from ? In the article in The Aberdeen Book-Lover, May, 1915, W[illiam Walker, author of ' The Bards of Bon Accord ' ?] describes Archibald Courage, an Aberdeen second-hand bookseller (1804- 1871), as being " related to the head " of the London brewers, Courage & Co., and as being the " last descendant of a family of Huguenot refugees" who came to this country in 1685,