Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/286

 280

NOTES AND QUERIES. EUS.IV. o CT .,i9i8.

sheriff was produced in Curia Regis, and no evidence to the contrary. If the single issue before the King was whether or not Roger de Gloucester had ever given the land at all, it would not have been needed. Mr. Roland Austin, Hon. Sec. of the Bristol and Gloucester Archaeological Society, favours me with the following copy of the notification above referred to, taken from the ' Gloucester Cartulary ' (Rolls Series, i. 235, where it is attributed to 1100-1112). It is important. The concluding sentence, with its change of tense from concessi to concede, is noteworthy :

CJXLII. Culna Bogerii. Carta secunda de laicis teniris.

Henricus, rex Anglise, Sampsoni episcopo Wygorniensi et Waltero vicecomiti de Gloucestria, et omnibus baronibus suis, Francis et Anglis, de Oloucestresyra, salutem.

Notum sit vobis quod dedi et concessi manerium -de Culna ecclesise Sancti Petri de Gloucestria ad communem victum monachorum, sicut Rogerius de Gloucestria eis dedit et concessit, et sicut melius tenuit, pro anima mea et uxoris rnese, et pro animabus antecessorum rneorum, et concede is escambium de horto monachorum in quo turris mea sedet, sicut Walterus vicecomes de OKoucestria eis liberavit.

The form dedi et concessi, though altered to concede in the after-part of the document, denotes generally an original grant. Genuine- ness admitted, I would paraphrase thus :

" Know ye that I have given and conceded to the monks Coin which Roger de Gloucester gave to them. And this concession I give them as satisfaction for the garden wherein is my tower."

CHABLES SWYNNEBTON.

"GONE WEST" (12 S. iv. 218). The following extract from chap. xv. of ' An Irish Cousin,' by E. CE. Somerville and Martin Ross, may have a bearing on the origin of this phrase. An old man is speaking of ghostly carriages which were believed to foretell a death :

" There was one that seen the black coach And four horses goin' icesht the road, over the bog, the time the owld man .... died ; and wansht . . . .there was a Sarsfield out, that time the Frinch landed beyond ia Banthry Bay, and the English cot him an' hung him ; but those People took him and dhragged him through hell and through det'th, and me mother's father heard the black coach taking him icesht to Myross Churchyard."

The word " wesht " is not in italics in the book.

Another clue seems definitely to associate the phrase with Ireland. Perhaps the ' Old Contemptibles " in 1914 learnt it from h 3 Irish regiments. In a review of Mr.

W. R. Le Fanu's ' Seventy Years of Irish Life,' published in 1893, occurs the following sentence :

" The Western Irish attach a sinister meaning to west. Jim Shea, a fishing attendant of Mr. Le Fanu, had a violent fit of coughing, but he explained : ' 'Tis not a cold I have at all, my lady, 'tis a fly that's gone west in my stomach.' "

J. RUDGE HABDING.

Is not the phrase " gone west " to be explained as due to the Celtic habit of saying " I am going west " in the sense " I am going back" or "going home" the habit illus- trated in Wordsworth's poem ' Stepping Westward ' ? G. C. MOOBE SMITH.

Sheffield.

The poet Aubrey de Vere, writing to a friend about Wordsworth in 1848, says : " May his tread be ever firm and his coun- tenance catch the new brightness as he continues to step westward." See ' Memoir of Aubrey de Vere,' by W. Ward, p. 142.^

A. F.

This phrase, ultimately referring to the belief in an earthly paradise, would seem to be of Irish origin. Gerald Griffin (I think in a story called ' The Half Sir ') represents a man condoling with a bereaved friend by saying, " I am sorry for your trouble westward." G. R. R.

W. E. J. will find the idea expressed more fully, though not more poetically, in Moore's well-known lines beginning :

How dear to me the hour when daylight dies ! JOHN B. WATNEWBIGHT.

" Gone west " was a common expression in Canada some years ago, and probably originated from the fact that the Far West was almost an unknown country, into which if a man ventured, he was considered as lost to his friends. C. R. I.

Elizabethan writers use the phrase " to go westward " in a much less romantic sense than to go to the Isles of the Blest. With them it means " to be hanged," as in Green's ' Art of Conny-Catching,' part 2, " Westward they go, and then solemnly make a rehearsal sermon at Tibirn " ; ibid., part 3, " Sailing westward in a cart to Tibirn."

In ' Eastward Hoe,' by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston, II. i., the London merchant Touchstone says to his idle apprentice Quicksilver, who is speculating in an American voyage, " Sir, Eastward hoe will make you go Westward ho."