Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/32

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s.x. JULY 12 ,1902.

generalissimo, had charge of two or more com mandos, and whose tenure of office began and ended with the hostilities. As the mobilization was a copy of the beginning of the every-year-recur- ring shift to the bush-veldt, so the advance of a commando, after the concentration of the different wyks had been effected, was an imitation .of an ordinary trek."

It is curious to find a wyk the unit, territorially speaking, of the military organization of the South African Republic and Orange Free State. Dutch dictionaries give the word as an equivalent for " quarter " of a town. The English official name is ward, as in Lanarkshire ; cf: Sir Walter Scott's 'Old Mortality' and Lord Kitchener's pro- clamations. But cf. wick in Borthwick. Were the London " wards " military units ? H.

JACOBITE VERSES I have never seen the following rimes in print or manuscript, ex- cept on the sheet of paper from which I have transcribed them. The original is in a hand of the early part of the eighteenth century. I have no idea as to who was the author :

James Caesar's Mare : a Farmer in Bedfordshire

who has lout his mare. My Neigb. James I must bewale, Who's lost his Mare both head and tayle. Honest himself in every thing As any man. God bless the King.

What Villains then were they

That stole his Mare away : A Curs upon such wicked men.

But Gadbury does tell

That all things shall goe well And the Man shall have his Mare again.

Some fooles that would their Neighbors fright Call James a bloody Jacobite, But he was n'er in proclamac'on Nor treason acted 'gainst the Nation,

And of late he did declare

The fellons he would spare. His mercy 's sure above all men.

Then let us all unite,

Both Whigg and Jacobite, That the man may have his own again.

EDWARD PEACOCK. Wickentree House, Kirton-in-Lindsey.

EFFIGY IN TETTENHALL CHURCHYARD. In Mr. Charles G. Harper's ' Holyhead Road ' there is an account, accompanied by an engraving, of a worn and battered monu- mental effigy of a woman in the churchyard of Tettenhall, near Wolverhampton. The figure is now without arms. Mr. Harper says they "have been hacked off at the shoulders," and recounts the legend that it is the memorial of a seamstress who, con- trary to the advice of her neighbours, per- sisted in working on Sundays, adding, with additional profanity, that "if it were wrong she hoped her arms would drop off." On the

following Sunday, while employing herself in her ordinary work, her arms aid drop off, and simple folk believe that this mutilated figure was made as a permanent record of her sin and its punishment (vol. ii. p. 59).

It is worth inquiry as to how far back this story can be traced, and whether it has arisen by way of accounting for the present state of the stone, or whether it preserves, in distorted form, the memory of the frightful distemper called " the fire," which was once very preva- lent across the Channel, though but little known in this country, yet it seems pro- bable that it occasionally occurred here. As, however, it is constantly mentioned in French chronicles and lives of saints, our people would have heard of it, if they had never come in contact with any of the sufferers. It was known as the "ignis sacer," "ignis Sancti Antonii," and "ignis infernalis," and we know, other evidence apart, from the testimony of the old saying, "Tres plagse tribus regionibus appropriari solent, An- glorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normanorum lepra," that it was regarded in a special way as a French disease.

Dr. Creighton in his ' History of Epidemics in Britain ' gives a most interesting account of the malady and the cause of its origin. I need not say that when an outbreak occurred in former times it was regarded as miraculous. Dr. Creighton tells us :

" The attack usually began with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and at a later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the while cold as ice Gangrene or sloughing of the extremi- ties followed ; a foot or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was, on the whole, a good sign for the recovery of the patient." Vol. i. p. 54.

The cause of this disease has now been discovered. It usually arises from a tainted condition of the rye of which the bread of the poor was made. After a wet summer, followed by a bad harvest, many of the grains became enlarged and subject to a parasitic mould, and Dr. Creighton is of opinion that, by the fermentation of this fungus, the meal becomes poisonous. The reason why English people were in a great degree spared Prom this infliction probably was that wheaten bread was the common food of every one

xcept in times of great scarcity. In more modern times England has not entirely

iscaped. In 1762 a peasant family of Wattis- iam, in Suffolk, consisting of eight persons, was attacked by what was undoubtedly " the ire." Dr. Creighton has compiled a good