Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/318

 310

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. XL APRIL is, im.

back and tied at the back with a bunch of ribbons, and is looking out of what appears to be a round embrasure in a wall. There is no notice of him in the ' D.N.B.' Is there any connexion between these Taylors and Mrs. Michael Angelo Taylor, the original of Hoppner's Miranda, who was of the Vane- Ternpest family ? J. B. DOUGLAS.

JUDAH P. BENJAMIN. Information is wanted about the ancestry of Judah Philip Benjamin, who made such a remarkable record as advocate in England, after escaping from America on the defeat of the Con- federacy, of which he was Attorney-General, Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State. His parents were English, and emigrated to America in 1811.

JOSEPH LEBOWICH.

71, Perkins Hall, Cambridge, Mass.

[See ' D.N.B.' and authorities quoted at end.]

ARTHUR GRAHAM. Along with Col. Des- pard and others, Arthur Graham was executed for high treason, 22 February, 1803. I shall be obliged to any one who can give me in- formation regarding him or the family to which he belonged. From his name it seems likely he was of, or descended from, the Cumberland stock.

WALTER M. GRAHAM EASTON.

THE OLD WIFE.

(9 th S. xi. 188.)

GIVING a story of an old wife who, for spinning on a Sunday, was condemned to spin for ever behind the rocks in the bed of a stream, A. R. Y. says, "From the refer- ence to Sunday this must be a modern myth." I understand him to mean by " modern " not pre-Christian ; but a learned friend thinks he means post-Reformation, and that he is attributing the prohibition of work on Sun- day to the Puritans, as if there had been no such prohibition before. My friend is a frequent contributor to ' N. & Q.,' but he asks me to forward a reply on the subject, and sends me two or three good references. There is, of course, no doubt that unnecessary work on Sundays, as on other holy days of obliga- tion, was always prohibited by the Church to Church people, and we find that this prohibi- tion was fully recognized among the early Irish and Anglo-Saxon Christians. As to the Irish Church, see Adamnan's 'Life of Columba' (Clarendon Press edition), Introd., pp. xlii n., xliv, where several refer- ences are given and some curious stories told

of what happened to Sunday-breakers. In lib. iii. cap. xii. we find mention of the Sunday Eucharist, the Sunday dinner, and the Sunday rest. The provisions of the Irish Cain Domnaigh, or Sunday law, brought over from Rome before 594, are " ultra- Sabbatarian," and include that wherever a man happened to be on a Saturday night, there was he to remain till Monday morning (O'Curry, * Manners,' &c., ii. 33). This is quite in accordance with what Bede relates of St. Cuthbert, that while being shown the Roman remains at Carlisle he suddenly stood still and was troubled in spirit, thinking that the battle in which the king was engaged was going against him. It was on a Satur- day, and he told the queen that she might go on Monday to see whether the king was slain or not, but that it was not lawful, even in a case like that, to travel on Sundays ('Vit. S. Cuthb.,' xxvii.).

I need not go into synodal enactments, but will call attention to some stories of how people were said to have been punished for transgressions of the Sunday law. Thomas of Ely relates how the maidservant of a certain priest tried to dig up vegetables in the garden on the Lord's Day, and the wooden tool stuck in her hand so firmly that it could not be loosened until she was cured by the merits of St. Audrey five years later (' Anglia Sacra,' i. 602). We learn from the ' Chronicle of Roger de Houeden,' Rolls Series, iv. 169, that in 1201 Eustace, Abbot of Flay (where was this ?), visited York, and preached the observance of Sunday from 3 P.M. on Satur- day to sunrise on Monday. His credentials were contained in a letter on the keeping of the Lord's Day professing to have come down from heaven. His teaching was enforced by further miracles. A carpenter of Beverley, making a wooden spike after the ninth hour of Saturday, was struck down by paralysis, and a woman weaving there, who, in her anxiety to finish her web, went on after the same hour, suffered the same fate. At Nafferton a man made bread baked under the ashes on Saturday afternoon, reserving some for the Sunday, but when he broke the bread on that day blood flowed out. At Wakefield the miller (probably at the " Soke Mill," still going) went on grinding on the Saturday afternoon, when suddenly there came a rush of blood from the hopper, and the mill-wheel stood unmoved by the vehe- ment impulse of the water. The well-heated oven of a woman in Lincolnshire refused to bake, and on the Monday morning she found nothing but raw paste therein. Another woman in the same county wisely waited till