Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/21

 12 S. V. JAN., 1919.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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c. 1420, and his connexion, if any, with William de Orlyiigbere of Norton by Daven- try, c. 1485, together with the parentage of George Orlyngbere of Eaton, who died 1553.

J. H. BLOOM. No. 601, 329 High Holbora, W.O.I.

GRAVES PLANTED WITH FLO WEBS. When did this custom come into vogue in Eng- land ? Mrs. Piozzi, on the tour in Wales with Dr. Johnson, wrote in her diary for Aug. 19, 1774: "In this churchyard [Bangor Cathedral] I first saw a grave stuck with various flowers, a large bunch of rosemary in the middle " ; indicating that nothing of a more permanent nature than the strewing of flowers on the surface, to which Shakespeare and others allude, was familiar until the approach of the nineteenth century. W. B. H.

.AUTHOR OF QUOTATION WANTED. Death, at the bedside standing,

Bade Love and Rope depart, But Faith, the All-Commanding,

Seized Death and held his dart. Death urged, " Give me the mother,

If I leave you the child." " Nay, nay, dear friend and brother,

I must have both," Faith smiled.

D. MACPlIAIL.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, EAST LONDONER.

(12 S. iv. 296.)

IN the remarkable Raleigh Tercentenary celebrations in London, when " the Shep- herd of the Ocea,n " at length secured " a place in the sun," there was nobody among the crowd of eloquent eulogists to recall that Sir Walter Raleigh had good claims to be counted as an East Londoner ; that it was in Old Stepney that he was tutored for the great task of his adventurous life by his half-brother, who was a resident in what was even then " the nursery of English seamen " ; and that men, arms, and muni- tioned vessels were there assembled for some of his exploits, and notably for the last fatal expedition to find the source of the gold of -El Dorado for the greedy, impecunious, and ruseful Scot who had succeeded to the throne of the Virgin Queen. When Sir Walter Raleigh sailed " from Limehouse " on his third voyage to Guiana, in "a pinnace named the Watte," he knew that landing-place on the Thames very

well ; it was, in fact, only an industrial annexe of Old Ratcliff until the time of Queen Anne, when it was made into a parish. From 1573 to 1578 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the famous Elizabethan soldier, sailor, discoverer, and colonizer the half- brother of Walter Raleigh lived " in retire- ment at Limehouse," for some reason not wholly explicable by any known records. That "retirement" (with practical banish- ment from Court) was certainly not absolute, for Gilbert relates that he lost the greater part of the fortune he got with his wife in a smelting and coppersmith's venture in Limehouse, along with, among others, Thomas Smith, who thought he had found a way of turning iron into copper. During the winter of 1574, when Gilbert was asked by a visiting friend " how he spent his time in this loitering vacation from martial stratagems," -the host showed " sundry profitable and very commendable exercises which he had perfected with his pen." Now, one of these was Gilbert's * Discourse for a New Passage to Cataia,' which was written partly in support of his petition of November, 1566, for privileges from Queen Elizabeth concerning the discovery of a North- West Passage to Cathay. It took ten years to get this "perfected " MS. into print, and it seems to have been the chief incentive to the Queen's letter to the Muscovy Company in 1574, calling upon that body either to dispatch another ex- pedition in this direction or to cede their privileges to other adventurers. The bearer of this letter was Martin Frobisher, to whom a licence was granted by the Com- pany, Feb. 3, 1575, together with divers gentlemen associated with him. Out of this grew Frobisher' s three voyages in search of a North-West Passage, which the local patriots of Old Stepney justly regard as East London enterprises, marshalled, manned, and stored in the old Port of London. When Sir Humphrey Gilbert got his charter from the Queen in " June, 1578, it was not carried out as an East London enterprise, although, of course, Stepney seamen asso- ciates sailed under Gilbert's pennon ; and with him were Walter Raleigh, his half- brother, and several West-Country folk.

And now, at long last, after the Raleigh tamasha 5 has ended, it is conceded by the principal literary patron of the assembly that when Sir Walter Raleigh had schemes for the English empire of the sea, had projected a discovery of the North- West Passage, and dreamed of the occupation, in the Northern parts of America, of terri-