Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/605

 12 a vm. JUNE is, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 499 1816, aged 56, and is buried in a vault in Walthamstow Churchyard. In the same vault are interred his son Charles Augustus Cooke and his grandson Charles Cooke. His executors were James White of Titchfield Street, Richard Corbould of Holloway, and Charles Hibbert of Princes Street, Soho. (Will, P.C.C., 241 Wynn). Any evidence of a connexion between G. A. Cooke and Charles Cooke would be very welcome to FRANK STANDFIELD. ' THE FABLE OF THE BEES * (12 S. viii. 433). The Proprietary Library in Ply- mouth has a copy of this work of the third edition, and an examination of the new matter added therein leads me to offer these remarks, although I am quite aware that they cannot be a real answer to MB. CLEMENT SHOBTEB'S question. This edition was printed in 1724 for J. Tonson, and the title page reads : The | Fable | of the | Bees : | or, | Private Vices, | Publick Benefits, | With an Essay on | Charity and Charity-Schools. | And | A Search into the Nature of Society | | The Third Edition. | | To which is added | A Vindication of the Book | from the Asper- sions contain' d in a Presentment | of the Grand- Jury of Middlesex and | an abusive Letter to Lord C. | | London : | Printed for J. Tonson, at the Shakespear's Head, | over-against Kathe- rine Street in the Strand. | MDCCXXIV. | The "Presentment" quotes from and complains of the "second edition, 1723," and on p. 473 the " Vindication " says : The first impression of the Fable of the Bees, which came out in 1714, was never carpt at, nor publickly taken notice of ; and all the Reason I can think on why this Second Edition should be so unmercifully treated. . . is an Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools which is added to what was printed before. It is clear from this that whatever was issued in 1714 was reckoned as only one edition. May I venture to suggest, there- fore, that there was so much demand for it that there had to be an extra issue, which was distinguished by a separate title page, but, as there was no change in or addition to the text, was not reckoned a new edition. It is noticeable that the third more nearly agrees with the second form given by MB. SHOBTEB. W. S. B. H. AUTHOR WANTED (12 S. viii. 451). ' With the Wild Geese,' by Emily Lawless, contains two short poems, ' Fontenoy.' H. on The Book of Fees commonly called Testa de Nevill. Reformed from the earliest MSS. by the Deputy Keeper of the Records. Part I., A.D. 1198-1242. (H.M. Stationery Office. 1 Is. net.) FEW of the publications of the Public Record Office will meet with a heartier or better deserved welcome than this new edition of that com- pilation long known to students of topography and genealogy as the ' Testa de Nevill,' and by them much used, but used under manifold dis- advantages. The book at their command was that which was published in 1807, most ineffectually edited by John Caley and W. Illingworth, in compliance with an order made by the Royal Commissioners on the Public Records in 1804. Its substance was a compilation, made in 1302, contained in two volumes of parchment leaves, officially styled ' Liber Feodorum.' The common name ' Testa de Nevill ' has not been finally accounted for, but there seems little reason to dissent from Sir H. C. Maxwell Lyte's explanation of it, as derived from some receptacle for certain early documents relating to knights' fees, which was marked with a head, known as the head of Nevill. The nature of the material underlying the compilation is most lucidly set out in the preface to this edition, and the difficulties of the scribe, amid the complicated returns with which he had to deal, together with his different attempts to overcome them, live again for the reader in these not only instructive but entertaining pages. The immediate occasion for this setting out in some sort of order the knights' fees and their holders, was the marriage of Edward I.'s eldest daughter Elizabeth, in 1302, to Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, for which the assessment of an Aid had to be undertaken. Two collections of documents were worked over an arrentation of serjeanties made in 1250, and the ' Testa de Nevill,' which comprised the returns of a number of separate inquisitions of varying importance and extent, the earliest being an assessment of serjeanties of the last year of Richard I. The 1807 edition of the ' Book ' thus produced was printed from a transcript of the MS. made by " a man of the name of Simpson, who was a writer in the Exchequer," in which such rudi- mentary arrangement of the material in sections as the MS. presents had been obliterated. The present edition does not follow the ' Book,' but goes back behind it to the rolls from which it is compiled. The existence of the ' Book ' had very naturally led to neglect of these ori- ginals, but, slowly and intermittently, from the time of the publication in 1807, the work of identification has proceeded, and there is now, under the new title, ' Exchequer K.R., Serjeanties, Knights' Fees, &c., ij.,' a bundle containing all the rolls used for the present edition. They do not offer an easy field of work. Even in 1302 the scribe had frequently been embarrassed by the earlier handwriting, and the Exchequer authorities made only a modest claim for the