Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/163

 12 S. V. JUNE, 1919.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

157

a man of substance and consideration very likely he built himself a house in keeping with these attributes, and, re- membering a book that he had read when a boy, and also his own name and present importance that he loomed large in, the public eye called it " Lilliput Castle."

This name Lilliput, I may mention, does not occur in the two old local histories : ' The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset,' by the Rev. John Hutchins, 3rd edit. 1861, and ' The History of the Town and County of Poole,' by John Sydenham, 1839. There is a station called " Lilliput Road '" on the Swansea and Mumbles Railway, and a hamlet called " Lillyhoo," four miles S.W. of Maidstone in Kent.

PENRY LEWIS.

WESTMINSTER HALL ROOF (12 S. v. 121). A tract published in 1625 can scarcely be regarded as the " printed source " of the tradition that there are no spiders in the roof of Westminster Hall because the timber is Irish. In Southey's ' Common- Place Book,' first series, p. 138, there is the following extract from an earlier and more Famous work than that of Benjamin Spenser :

" Thus it hath been the complaint of all ages, 'eges esse telas aranearum, vel quia juridici *unt iraneae,vd quiamitfica^capiunt. et vexpaxdimittunt. But I am not of their rnind ; for I think that God in liis providence hath so fitly ordained it, as prophe- sying or prescribing a lesson, that the timber in Westminster Hall should neither admit cobweb rior spider; and God make us thankful for the r ree course of our justice." Godfrey Goodman,
 * The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature

proved by the Light of his Naturall Reason.'

Bishop Goodman's book was published in .616, and the superstition referred to was, it nay be presumed, already familiar. The com- >arison of laws to cobweb^ is ascribed by Valerius Maximus and Plutarch to Ana- rharsis, and by Stobaeus to Zaleucus. The 'orm of the saying as given by Goodman is nost like that in Stobaeus.

A similar legend has attached itself to hat " glorious Work of fine intelligence." king's College Chapel, Cambridge.

In Wil kin's edition of Sir Thomas Browne's >Vorks there is a note of Wren's in bk. vi.
 * hap. vii of the ' Pseudodoxia Epidemica,'

n which we are told that venomous things lie

' on Irish earthe, brought thence by ship into our larthe, but to the timber brought thence, as
 * ardens in England : nor is this proper to Irish

appeares in that vast roof of King's College Chappel in Cambridge, where noe man ever saw a spider, or their webs, bycause iit is all of Irish timber."

Wilkin wrote to a friend in Cambridge and gave an extract from his reply, which referred to " the traditional account of the roof, and more particularly the organ loi't of King's College Chapel, being formed of Irish oak, and that no spielers or their webs are to be found upon it." After personal inquiry and investigation Wilkin' s friend said that he could discover no cobwebs or spider?, but was informed that spiders' webs were very abundant in some parts of the stone roof underneath the wooden roof. Wilkin also refers to a paper in the Philo- sophical Transactions, lix. 30, by the Hon. D. Barrington, who examined several ancient timber roofs without detecting any spiders' webs, and explained this as due to the absence of flies in such situations. But, as Wilkin observes, this seems inconsistent with the number of cobwebs found in the stone roof of King's. Dairies Barrington was one of Charles Lamb's " old Benchers." and we may guess that the roof under which ' Twelfth Night ' was first acted was among those examined.

Some of these references were given by me at 12 S. iii. 306 in an answer on the Folk- Lore of the Spider. EDWARD BENSLY.

ALDELIMA, 1280 : ITS LOCALITY (12 S. V- 96). jt a,ppears from Domesday Book that Aldelime was in the hundred of War- mendestrou in Cheshire. Cheshire formed part of the diocese of Lichfield until the formation of the dioce.se of Chester temp. Henry VIII. Aldelime would therefore be described in 1280 as in the diocese of Lich- field (see Hemingway's ' Hist, of the City of Chester,' i. 296). The hundred of War- mendestrou became, about the time of Edward III., the hundred of Nantwich ( ' Hist, of Cheshire/ published by Poole of Chester, 1778, p. 865). In the work last cited there is given on pp. 74-5 a list of benefices in Cheshire extracted from a MS. at Cambridge. These benefices include Aldalem, the annual value of which was ~)l. 16s. 8cZ. On p. 47 of the same work there s a list of all villages and townships in the hundred of Nantwich. One of these is Audlem. Lysons says : " The township of Audlem, or, as it was anciently written, Aldelym, lies nearly seven miles south by east from Nantwich" ('Magna Britannia,' vol. ii. part 2, p. 494). Audlem in the inndred of Nantwich still exists.

GEORGE NEWALL.