Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/190

 152 NOTES AND QUERIES. [i 2 s.ix. AUG. 20, 1921. out as being the places where the attempts were made. Your correspondent is referred to * The Myth of the Pent Cuckoo ' by the Rev. John Edward Field (London, Elliot Stock, 1913). The author states that the district in which these cuckoo pens abound is MR. ROTTER has only to refer to the Pipe Rolls to see how many of the barons, on, whom the King could exercise authority most directly, were in arrears with their payments. They had to pay so much. They actually- paid so much. The balance was carried forward as an arrear, "' And he owes so along the west front of the Chiltern Hills of Oxford- much." shire and in the adjacent valley, while isolated B ut even if it were granted that arrears examples are known also in the more remote -r, ri i^ n ^ part of the same county, and in the neighbouring i * the GteldrcOl do not mean arrears in the counties of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire ; i ordinary sense, 1 do not see how this helps , not yet ^ ally a <* u r* f ? ry? i I sm a ller than (if they do not agree with) the totals we arrive at by adding up the Domesday the people of Somerset are ridiculed as the, pS jc rnP v l tQ Tn TvroHnpp norppniPTit we d " Cuckoo Penners " by their neighbours of Wilt- i assessments, lo produce agre shire, and they retaliate upon the Wiltshire | not wisn to reduce but to increase the totals folk as the " Moonrakers." | of the Geldroll hundreds ; or else to omit The author's theory is that the " cuckoo I estates from the Domesday hundreds as pens" and the legends relating to them not liable to assessment, let Domesday preserve reminiscences of the time when the ives us their assessment. How can we do invading English captured the villages, and thls ? OSWALD J. REICHEL. the Britons found their last places of re- : Lympstone, Devon. fuge on the ridges of the hills above. What- 1 ever may be thought of the theory, the i HOCKLEY or HAMPSHIRE (12 S ix. 30). book contains a good deal of information | The Hockleys were a very old Winchester with reference to these cuckoo pens, and the ! family, many of whom filled the office of folk-lore connected with the cuckoo -penning Mayor John de Hockley, 1206 ; Ralph de stories. WM. SELF-WEEKS. Hockley, 1278 ; John de Hockley, 1306 ; Westwood, Clitheroe. DOMESDAY AND THE GELD INQUESTS ( 12 S. ix. 65). MR. RTJTTER has propounded theory that when the Geldroll states that tenant was in arrear, this does not mean that he was really owing money to the King, but that the Commissioners had not yet decided whether he had to pay at all or not. And he advances this theory to account for variations between the totals which the Geldroll names for each hundred and the ^ totals of the assessments obtained by adding ' Henry Hockley were joined to the Mayor John de Hockley, 1333 ; Robert Hockley, 1436. Wavell records that in St. Bartholomew's. Hyde, was a stone inscribed : HIC JACET ISABELLA HOCLEY, MATER EDWARD! HOCLEY, ARTIUM MAGISTKI ET TUNC VICARII ISTIITS ECCLE QUE OBIIT VIII DIE MEXSIS FEBRUARII ANO DNI MILLE CCCCLXXXIII., CUJUS AXIMA PROPICIETUR DEUS. At the building of the old Hanoverian Guildhall in 1712, Messrs. Thomas Godwin, Richard Spearing, Nicholas Purdue and together the assessments of each manor in the same hundred. and Aldermen to carry out the work, to- wards which some elm-trees were cut down The theory is a little startling', and so far in Parchment Street. as I gather from his paper it is based upon | In an act for widening the roads 29 another theory which is certainly new if it j George II., 1756 the trustees" names are is not quite as startling. " It is impossible," i Richard Gifford, George Hunt, John Hock- he says, " to believe that those men [the i ley, Norton Powlet, William Powlet, Charles villeins on the King's county lands] on whom ' Powlet, William Pescoed. the royal authority must have been exer- I In the will of Robert Forder, Esquire, of cised most directly could have been uni- I Pitt, in Hursley, Yeoman, dated July 31, versally withholding payment." Surely I 1670, reference is made ". . . to my grand- theory No. 2 is an unproven conjecture, sons, Moses and Richard Hockley 10 each ; and at best is not a proof of theory No. 1. and to my grandson William Hockley 20.