Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 4.djvu/52

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. iv. JULY is, ion.

' This is vastly interesting as it stands ' but there must be some mistake. " Five years ago " ! Why, in 1897 St. Expeditus was niched in ' N. & Q.' (8 S. xii. 425) ; and in 1906 I wrote from Laon about a fascinating image of him I had seen at Vaux. I believe I had previously met with one at Tarascon, but I failed to find it last Ttime I was in the country of Tartarin. 10 S. v. 107, 156, 216, 297, may also be pro- -fitably consulted as to St. Expeditus. He rseems to be rather mythical, but certainly was not about to be invented a lustrum .ago. ST. SWITHIN.

TAILED ENGLISHMEN. (See 7 S. vi. 347, 493 ; vii. and viii. passim. ) At the second reference a distich is quoted from a mediaeval MS. at Berlin, as follows :

Anglicus a tergo caudam gerit ; est pecus ergo. v<Jum tibi dicit ave, sicut ab hoste ca\ T e.

We find from Skel ton's ' Poems,' ed. Dyce, Boston (U.S.), 1856, i. 213, that one Dundas of Galloway produced a triad of similar character :

Anglicus a tergo caudam gerit ; est eanis ergo.

Ariglice caudate, cape caudam ne cadat a te.

Ex causa caudse manet Anglica gens sine laude.

Skelton covers Dundas with abuse and ridi- cule, much of which he deserves.

RICHARD H. THORNTON. -36, Upper Bedford Place, W.C.

WHIG CLUB BOOK. I think I recently saw an announcement to the effect that the Whig Club Book was to be printed, and I hope that this may be true. I came across the other day a newspaper cutting, dating from the thirties or forties of the last century, in which it is stated that the Whig Club Book from 1784 to its decline was sold at Southgate's auction-rooms in Fleet Street for 36 guineas, and that the purchaser was " Bagster." W. ROBERTS.

" PRIVET " : ITS ETYMOLOGY. Though the 'N.E.1V considers the etymology of "privet" to be "unknown," and rejects the idea of its being a doublet of private (see 10 S. ix. 148, 197), that great authority affords, I think, ample evidence in support -of such a conclusion. The word's several variants, priuie, prevet, prim, prim-print, are quite in line with the obsolete forms of " private," viz., pry vat, privet, privit ; while the earliest quotation under the adjective from Trevisa (1398) seems to indicate how the former term came to be applied to a private road, way, or hedge, or to a portion
 * >f ground shut off from the main part of

a garden : " The priuate wey longith to ny$e towne and is schort and ny$ and ofte y growe with gras."

From the practice of using this shrub, Ligustrum Vulgare, to make hedges, which, of course, were kept carefully clipped for the sake of convenience, rather than for ornament, causing them to present a formal and regular appearance no doubt the variant " prim - print," or simply " prim," was evolved, the former looking uncommonly like a mis-reading, or misspelling, of " prim privet."

The other early examples given by the 1 N.E.D.,'

Set priuie or prim,

Set boxe like him, Tusser (1573),

and " The borders round about are set with priuie sweete," Breton (1593), show pretty plainly the derivation of the word to bo analogous to that of the substantive common ; the latter denoting land common to the public needs, as the former denoted a path or hedge demarcating private property or preserves. One more example from the year 1650 makes the matter, I think, quite obvious : "If all your regiments were but so many private bushes."

In regard to the meaning of the Latin quotation of 1256 at the first reference, " excepto marisco qui vocatur benny et excepto parco et excepto cooperto de preuet," I would construe " except the marsh known as Benny's, together with the plan- tation and Preuet' s covert," Prevet being a personal name of the locality ; while, as SIR J. MURRAY observes, the name of the bush does not occur in English till the sixteenth century. Even the adjectival form is only met with apparently towards the end of the fourteenth. N! W. HILL.

New York.

SPANISH ARMADA : SHIP WRECKED IN TOBERMORY BAY. A paragraph lately ap- peared in The Glasgow Herald stating that explosives had been applied to the Armada hulk in Tobermory Bay, but without " commensurate results." The operations were accordingly discontinued on Saturday, 10 June, and during the following week the salvage vessel was dismantled.

The failure of the treasure hunt will hardly come as a surprise to many, as it had been frequently pointed out that the vessel in question was not the Florencia, and that she carried no appreciable amount of treasure. It was, for instance, stated by a contributor to ' N. & Q.' (10 S. xii. 330) that the Tobwnory *hip was really the