Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 4.djvu/492

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NOTES AND Q UERIES. [ii s. iv. DEC. ie, 1911.

had recourse to an ancient god whose wor- ship had expired some five or six hundred years previously. If we wish for an Anglo-Saxon eponym, Luda, Lude, and Ludda, with many dithematic forms, will be found in Mr. Searle's ' Onomasticon Anglo- Saxonicum.' Some people have de- rived the name of " Billingsgate " from the Celtic god Belenos or Belinos, which is found in the regal name Cunobelinos (Cym- beline), but there is surely no need to go beyond the well-known A.-S. " Billing." If a personal name is discredited, we have the A.-S. word " hlidgeat " or " hlydgeat," a postern which separated the city from the fields beyond. This long survived as " lid- gate," a field gate, as well as in the proper names Lydgate, Lidgett, Leggett, &c. Bos- worth in his ' Compendious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary ' gives the form " ludgeat," a postern gate. I hardly think that Ludgate was one of the more ancient of the City portals, as I cannot find it mentioned before the beginning of the fourteenth century.

W. F. PBIDEAUX.

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND HIS SNOW FAMILY. In St. Bonaventura's biography of St. Francis of Assisi we are told of a " grievous temptation of the flesh " by which he was beset. After scourging himself he went into the garden, and, thrusting his naked body into a great snow heap, began to pile up seven heaps of snow :

" Behold," said he, " this larger heap is thy wife, these four be two sons and two daughters, the other two are a man servant and a maid servant, that thou must have to serve thee. Bestir thee to clothe them, for they be perishing with cold. But if many cares for them trouble thee, take thou care to serve the One Lord." Chap. v. s. iv.

A curious anticipation'of the spirit of this story may be found at a much earlier date. In Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge's translation of the Syriac ' Paradise or Garden of the Holy Fathers .... of the Deserts of Egypt between A.D. 250 and A.D. 400 circiter ' (London, 1907, vol. ii. p. 127, No. 564) there is^the following anecdote :

" There was a certain old man who lived in a cell, and his thoughts said unto him, ' Go, take to thyself a woman ' ; then he rose up straight- way and kneaded together some mud, and made thejfigure of a woman, and he said to himself, ' Behold thy wife ! it is necessary for thee to labour with all thy might that thou mayest be able to feed her.' And he laboured with his hands and twisted many ropes. Then after a few days he rose up and made the figure of a woman, and said unto his thoughts, ' Behold, thy wife

hath brought forth, it is necessary for thee to work harder to keep thy wife and to clothe thy daughter ' ; and thus doing he vexed his body sorely. And he said unto his thought, ' I cannot bear this work, and since I am unable to bear the work, a wife is unnecessary for me ' ; and God saw his labour, and did away his thoughts, and he had peace."

WILLIAM E. A. AXON. Manchester.

LAW-HAND. The following passages occur in a long article on ' English Handwriting ' in The Times Literary Supplement of 2 November :

"Our legal documents .... their only merit is legibility .... no writing was ever more legible than the average lawyer's deed of the present day .... nothing more inartistic has ever been produced .... In the miraculously finished ' black- letter Gothic ' of ecclesiastical books in the

fifteenth century, experts easily detect two

pens were certainly used, a thick one and a fine one."

I have seen a considerable number of deeds of the present day, many of them in a com- monplace commercial hand, often ill done and not very legible. Law-hand has de- teriorated since the time of Charles I. In the Commonwealth it was very bad. But a debased imitation of the old hand, with the leading words in what was called German text, was not unusual in the -last century. I served under articles in a con- veyancing office in a large Northern town from 1864 to 1869, and I can say that the use of two pens did not need to be detected by an expert. Our engrossing clerks al- ways used two pens for the leading words in large characters. The thick strokes were done by a wood pen, made by the clerk himself, by simply cutting the top of his penholder into the required shape. They were then finished by the ordinary steel pen. The red border-lines were drawn by a tin pen, a cylinder nipped at the lower end so as to leave a narrow exit for the special liquid. The spacing for the writing lines was marked by a wheel-pricker.

The surface of the skin was prepared by the application of pounce, put on by a flat ball of rubber. This was to counteract greasiness, to fill up any slightly porous places, and to give a better bite for the pen. As pounce is destructive to cloth, the clerks had black holland sleeves to draw over their arms. Book-form deeds, which have the .disadvantage of necessitating writing on the wrong side of the parchment, had not been invented. We never divided a word at the j end of a line, and never punctuated. The i ' Legal Notices ' printed, e.g. in The Times,