Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/602

 496 NOTES AND QUERIES. r 12 S.X.JUNE 24, 1922. band of this cross should be uppermost next to the flagstaff ; if reversed he will find the narrow band is uppermost. I may mention that every boy scout is taught this. EDGAR F. BRIGGS. A supplement to 'N. &. Q.' of June 30, 1900 (reprinted June, 1908) entitled ' The National Flag, being the Union Jack,' contained a coloured illustration of the flag, with an account by MR. W. H. ST. JOHN HOPE. J. R. H. YORKSHIRE USE or " THOU " (12 S. x. 408, 456, 476). There is a warning in Lydgate's ' Merito Missa,' as edited by Canon T. F. Simmons in ' The Lay Folks Mass Book ' (Surtees Society), which warns an irreverent jester in the House of God : And thou I klype the prowde knapys, That make in 'holy chyrche Japis. " (11. 190-1, p. 153). This is curious, in face of the fact that we English also address the Almighty in the second person singular. Canon Simmons supplies a memorable anecdote in his comment on the quotation I have given from Lydgate (p. 309). He says of the penalty incurred by the jester : This thouing him was the extreme of insult, and it may be worth noting that the very phrase is still used in this part of England [East Riding, Yorks] with the same intention. I have heard it more than once as a matter of complaint, and I will copy what I wrote some five-and-twenty years ago. ... A man who had forbidden his mother-in-law his house said to me, " I'll not deny it ; I did thou her, and sorry I is to thou my wife's mother, but I says to her Thou I calle thee, and I bide thee get thee out of my house and never again set thy foot over my freshwood (threshold)." I may add that as a matter of course and in all good part he would have thoued his wife, friends, children and servants, the plural being reserved for elders, betters and strangers, according to the received etiquette of the country- side. ST. SWITHIN. The following interesting remarks of Archbishop Trench, in his ' English Past and Present ' (2nd ed., London, Parker, 1855), p. 153, are worth extracting : The entire dropping among the higher classes of " thou " except in poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and, as a necessary consequence, the drop- ping also of the second singular of the verb with its strongly marked flexion, as " lovest," "lovedst," is another example of a force once existing in the language, which has been, or is being, allowed to expire. In the seventeenth century it was with German, and with " tu " in French ; being, as it then was, the sign of familiarity, whether that familiarity was of love or of contempt and scorn. Here occurs this footnote : Thus Wallis ('Grramm. Ling. Anglic.,' 1653): " Singular! numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis." Then Trench resumes : It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter Raleigh's trial (1603) Coke, when argument and evidence failed him, insulted the defendant by applying to him the term " thou " : " All that Lord Cobham did was at thy instigation, thou viper ! for I thou thee, thou traitor ! " And when Sir Toby Belch, in ' Twelfth Night,' is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to send a sufficiently provocative challenge to Viola, he suggests to him that he " taunt him with the licence of ink ; if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." To keep this in mind will throw con- siderable light on one early peculiarity of the Quakers, and give a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at present it is very far from possessing. We shall see that, however unneces- sary and unwise their determination to " thee " and " thou " the whole world was, yet this had a significance. It was not, as it now seems to us to be, and through the silent changes which the language has undergone, as now it indeed is, an unmeaning departure from the ordinary usage of society, but meant something ; and, right or wrong, had an ethical motive ; being, indeed, a testimony upon their parts, however misplaced, that they would not have high, or great, or rich men's persons in admiration ; nor give to some what they withheld from others. And it was a testimony which cost them something ; at present we can very little understand the amount of courage which this " thou-ing " and " thee-ing " of all men must have demanded on their parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence which it stirred up in them who were not aware of or would not allow for, the scruples which induced them to it. What the actual position of the compellation " thou " was at that time we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller's ' Church History,' Dedication of Book VII.: " In opposition whereunto [i.e. } to the Quaker usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command ; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity ; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness ; if from affectation, a tone of contempt." Trench adds : It is, however, in its other aspect that we must chiefly regret the dying out of the use of " thou " that is, as the voice of peculiar intimacy and special affection, as between husband and wife, parents and children, and such other as may be knit together by bands of more than common affection. In a paper by Edward Kirk, in the Trans- actions of the Manchester Literary Club, vol. iii., p. 104, the usage in the neighbour- hood of Goosnargh, Inglewhite, and Chipping,
 * ' thou " in English as it is still with " du " in