Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/553

 12 s. x. JUNE 10, 1022.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 455 to the Castle of Wigmore in place of certain days' work in harvest formerly performed for the lord by the tenants. Snottering silver was a small annual payment made by the tenants of the village of Wylegh to the Abbot of Colchester. . Suit silver was a small sum paid by the freeholders in some manors to excuse their attendance at the manor courts. Ward penny was a payment towards watch and ward. Water-gavel was a payment for fishing in, or other benefit received from, a river. Whitehart silver was a payment in respect of certain lands, in or near the forest of Whitehart, said to have been imposed by Henry III. on Thomas de la Linde for killing a beautiful white hart, which that King had before spared in hunting. From what is stated above, it will be gathered that the many small customary payments, which were formerly payable in different places, and which may perhaps in some instances still be paid, arose in various ways ; and for this reason it is very difficult, in the absence of further information, especially with regard to the person to whom the " hay silver " was paid, to say exactly what was its origin, particularly as the absence of any reference to hay silver in the Law Dictionaries tends to show that the term was merely of local use. Jacob gives gavelmed as " the duty or work of mowing grass or cutting of meadowland required by the lord from his customary tenants, consuetude falcandi quae vocatur gavelmed," ^ncl the duty of assisting in getting in the lord's hay was certainly formerly often imposed on customary tenants. The payments in question might therefore have been in commutation of this duty, but if they were payable to the parson, or to a lay impropriator, they might very well be a modus in lieu of the tithe of hay. On the other hand, they may have had nothing whatever to do with hay, as haia or hay often spelt hey, signified a hedge or enclosure, and hay-bote was a right to take wood for the repair of hedges and fences ; and Cowell gives hey-loed as a customary burden laid upon inferior tenants for mending or repairing the heys or fences. Hence hay silver may have originally been paid for the privilege of getting hay-bote, or it may have been paid in commutation of a liability for the repair of fences. Again, a hayward was an officer appointed to keep the common herd of cattle of a town, and hay silver may perhaps have been originally hayward silver, and in this case it would represent the money the various householders contributed towards his wages, Besides this, haga was an old term for a house. Maigne d'Arnis, in his abridgment of Du Cange, interprets haga both by seps, sepes ( ' Monasticon Anglicam,' haie), and also by domus (maison, principalement maison des champs, ' Mons. Angl.'). Perhaps, therefore, hay silver was equivalent to house silver. If so, several origins might be suggested for it, but the most probable would be that it was the same as smoke silver. There were lands in some places held by the payment of 6d. yearly to the sheriff, called smoke silver. Smoke penny and smoke silver were also paid to the ministers of divers parishes as a modus in lieu of tithe wood, and in some manors, formerly belonging to religious houses, there was paid, as appendant to such manors, the annual Peter's pence, by the name of smoke money, long after the payment of Peter's pence to Rome had ceased. These small customary payments, at the time they originated, represented substantial sums, but the great fall in the value of money, since medieval times, has rendered them of negligible value, and where they have ceased to be paid, it was probably in most instances because it was not worth while to incur the trouble of collecting them. I regret the conjectural character of my communication, indeed I fear some of my conjectures are somewhat far-fetched, but for the reasons above stated I think no definite reply to MR. BABNABD'S inquiry can be given in the absence of further information with regard to the payments he refers to. WM. SELF-WEEKS. Westwood, Clitheroe. " Hay " certainly may mean " hedge," as in haybote, " allowance of wood or thorns for repairing hedges," and hayward, " mano- rial officer in charge of enclosures " ; but the ' E.D.D.' quotes hay silver in the sense of "a tithe-charge of one shilling an acre upon mown land," from Derbyshire, with a reference to " Addy Gl. (1891)." Accord- ing to the bibliography in vol. vi. this must mean Sidney Oldall Addy's supplement to his ' Glossary of Words used in the Neigh- bourhood of Sheffield,' published by the English Dialect Society. L. R. M. STRACHAN. Birmingham University.