Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/574

 472 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12S. x. JUNH 17, 1922. of the corporation) and five other house- holders for not giving bond to the town in respect of inmates taken in by them. An illegitimate child was chargeable to | the parish in which it was born, and hence ! the action of the churchwardens and ' overseers of the parish of Leonard- Stanley in obtaining the bond in question, and their taking it from the householder, in whose house the child was expected to be born, was similar to the practice, followed at Clitheroe, of making the householder responsible for inmates in his house. The bond, of course, bore the proper stamp required by the revenue laws of the period, as without it no court would have enforced it. In fact the stamp duties imposed on deeds and other documents are the price paid to the State for allowing them to be legally enforced. There is nothing remarkable in the bi -lingual character of the document. Down to the reign of George II. Latin was the language in which legal proceedings were recorded in the law courts, and this example probably influenced law- yers with regard to deeds and accounts for their being in Latin till a comparatively late period. Bonds, however, were a partial exception. The bond itself (that is, that part of the document which created the obligation to pay the penal sum) was, like other deeds-, written in Latin, but the condition appended to it (which set forth what the obligor had to do, or abstain from doing, in order to avoid the penalty men- tioned in the bond) was usually in English, so that the framer of this bond only followed the usual routine of the period in making it bi-lingual. WM. SELF-WEEKS. Westwood, Clitheroe. Many such bonds would be found in parish chests which have been allowed to retain the accumulations of centuries, though the Latin version seems to have been abandoned as time went on. I once sorted into "bundles a chaotic collection of old Poor Law documents in a Staffordshire chest, and noticed an occasional Latin word in the explanatory deed, as if the scribe was still in the habit of compiling it in Latin, and inadvertently repeated a word in the docu- ment intended for rustic use, e.g., in 1699 John Simmill is described as '" clauifaber alias nailor." Among papers of another class, the Removals Orders, I noted one which con- tained a reference to a clandestine marriage, and a curious name for both the officiant and his office. Thomas W, born at Wem r deposes " that he was married about last Christmas to Mary G, at Elizabeth Stokes's, widow, of the Liberty of Wolver- hampton, by one Abednego Meredeth, a Lawless Parson." Dated 1751, June 15. A. T. M. TAILLESS CATS (12 S. x. 431). -The Manx cat came from the Isle of Man originally and is a distinct breed. In the Crimea is fount I another kind of cat which has no tail- These particulars are given in ' Concerning Cats,' by Helen M. Winslow (1900), printed in Norwood, Mass., U.S.A., and published in London by David Nutt.. H PROSSER CHANTER. Whetstone, X.20. In Simpson's ' Book of the Cat ' (London, 1903), chap. xxii. is given up to a considera- tion of Manx cats, and it is there stated " that a Manx cat of the true type should have no particle of tail only a tuft of hair which ought to be boneless." The author does not mention throughout the whole of her exhaustive work any other breed of cat without a tail, and presumably there is no other, although she quotes from Gambler Bolt on the tradition that one of the vessels of the Spanish Armada, sinking near the Isle of Man in the memorable year 1558, had some tailless cats on board which had been procured during one of the vessel's voyages to the Far East. These cats swam to the rocks and made their way to shore, and from them have sprung all the Manx cats to be found in many parts of Great Britain and elsewhere. ARCHIBALD SPARKE. APPRENTICES TO AND FROM OVERSEAS (12 S. x. 429). '" Soulgrace " is an error for Soulegre. The father died in London in 1760, aged 94. and the apprentice was buried May 1, 1726, in St. Stephen's, Walbrook. V. L. OLIVER, F.S.A. PRISONERS WHO HAVE SURVIVED HANG- ING (12 S. vii. 68, 94, 114, 134, 173, 216, 438 ; viii. 73 ; ix. 18). The case, noticed in the- original query, of Anne Greene, hanged and recovered at Oxford, is additionally interest- ing, not only, as noted by your querist, through being celebrated in verse by Chris- topher Wren, then a gentleman commoner at Oxford, but also because, if the entry in John Evelyn's Diary of March 22, 1675, may be presumed, as it always is, I think, to refer to the same event, the resuscitator was that