Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 12.djvu/502

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NOTES AND QUERIES. UIS.XH. DEC. 25,1915.

" Mix both with man and womankind, More than folk think you kin display.

No souls your bodies hold confined, Yet yoxi exist as well as they."

Oxen.

We cows and oxen, goats and sheep,

When Christmas ringing* bids us heed,

Despite the cold and darkness deep, Bush like the wind to serve His need.

Cows.

On wisps of straw and ash lies low Jesus ; behold Him chill and pale !

Soon with our breaths we '11 raise a glow, And bring the colours back that fail.

Sheep.

As for the Virgin Mary good,

She looks right well and full of ijrace.

She bore the pains of motherhood,! Of which we see not now a trace.

Goats. St. Joseph stands aside the while,

Holding a broom he sometimes plies ; He will not let a thing defile

The shed wherein Babe Jesus lies.

All the Animals.

To the poor creatures that we be

Grant this one favour, Lord, in love

Make us so like to man that we May be acceptable above.

Finally the Cure sprinkled his quadrupedal parishioners all save the frisky goats with holy-water, and they were taken home to their cribs.

After the feast of St. Antony (17 January) horses, mules, cows, &c., were, and I hope still are, brought to the Church of S. An- tonio Abbate (Rome) to be blessed by a priest, who asperges them and says : " Per intercessionem beati Antoni Abbatis hsec animalia liberentur a malis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti Amen." Augustus J. C. Hare in ' Walks in Rome,' ii. 81, 82, has some useful quotations referring to the observance, which was inherited from kindly pagan practice. St. Comely (Pope Cornelius), in whose name the parish church of Carnac is dedicated, is also regarded as being a friend of domestic animals, many of which are brought to Carnac to receive his favours, especially on 13 September. Those with horns, as his name suggests, are his speciality, but in a coloured broadsheet I have of him a pig, a " rooster," a duck, and other unhomed things gather before him confidently. ST. SWITHIN.


 * Nadol.

t This is contrary to another tradition.

THE WINCHESTER HALL-BOOK OF 1414-5 AND OTHER RECORDS.

ONE fact which was established in the- course of my article on the Hall-book of 1406-7 (ante, pp. 293, 313) is that Robert Heete, while compiling our Register, fell somehow into an error which caused him for a while to be dating his lists just a year too early ; for instance, the list which he assigned to 10 H. IV. is really of Scholars who were admitted under the Election held in August r 11 H. IV. (1410). The Hall-book of 1414-5 discloses Heete' s artful device for rectifying his chronology.

This book for I propose to deal with some other points before saying more about the Register is marked " on its cover,. " Nomina comniensalium in Collegio anna r. r. Henr. quinti iij," the regnal year which began on 22 March, 1414/5, while the book was current. The book itself had been begun in the previous autumn, for its first leaf contains, besides the usual list of names and the diary for the first week, a complete reckoning of the allowances for that week,, and the reckoning is headed :

" Allocationes facte pro epmmunis custodi* sociorum, &c. de A r. r. Henrici quinti secundo.V

The plan of noting the allowances in the Hall-book was continued for nine weeks; more, and the agreement between the reckonings thus given and those to be found in the Account-roll of 1414-5 shows con- clusively that the book and the roll belong to precisely the same bursarial year. The roll, as we learn from its heading, runs from Michaelmas, 2 H. V. ; and similarly (so the inference must be) the day upon which the- Hall-book starts is Saturday, 29 Sept., 1414. In both documents the year is divided into four equal quarters of thirteen weeks each, the 2nd quarter commencing, therefore, on 29 Dec., the 3rd on 30 March, and the 4th on 29 June. In the Hall-book the 8th week of the 2nd quarter is called " prima septimana quadragesime," and we are thus reminded that Ash Wednesday had occurred in the preceding week. It fell in 1415 on 13 Feb.

We are concerned with a year which wit- nessed the King's departure from England with troops, remnants of whom were des- tined to be engaged in the Battle of Agin- court. At the end of June, 1415, Henry f on his way to the sea, was met at Winchester by an embassy from Charles VI. ; but tty& eloquence of their spokesman, maistre