Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/206

 198

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. xn. SEPT. 5, 1903.

native county by people who should have known far better.

I well remember that when the law was about to be altered so as to cause capital executions to be carried out in private many of those who were opposed to the change gave, among other reasons, this one : that if the public had not an opportunity given of seeing criminals suffer death, it would be thought by many that notorious evildoers had escaped their legal doom.

EDWARD PEACOCK.

Wickentree House, Kirton-in-Lindsey.

'BEOWULF' (9 th S. xii. 83). Your corre- spondent has the advantage of me, as I only know * Beowulf ' in the original ; but when he compares "swymman" and "sund" in Thorpe's 'Glossary,' he should know that 4 'sund"=* English sound, hence sea, occurs six times in ' Beowulf ' without the^ slightest connexion with swimming. If it be of interest to your correspondent, " swymman " occurs in the original once, "ofer-swimman " once, and "sund "=swimming four times, according to the most copious glossary with which I am acquainted. H. P. L.

HAMBLETON TRIBE (9 th S. xii. 129). This probably refers to the district in which the town of Hamilton, the principal one in the island of Bermuda, is situated.

R. BARCLAY-ALLARDICE.

Lostwithiel, Cornwall.

WHALEY FAMILY (8 th S. v. 287). The query at this reference does not seem to have been answered. The earlier volumes of ' N. & Q.' contain much information and many refer- ences which the inquirer would find very useful e.g., 3 rd S. i. 452; ii. 76, 149, 314; v. 155 ; vi. 297 ; 4 th S. iii. 591 ; 5 th S. v. 463 ; 7 th S. x. 7. W. ROBERTS.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.

The Unreformed House, of Common*. By Edward Porritt, assisted by Annie S. Porritt. Vol. I. England and Wales. Vol. II. Scotland and Ire- land. (Cambridge, University Press.) IN the case of a work of this class, dealing wholly with British questions, it adds to the admiration with which we are disposed to regard it to find that it was written entirely in America and without any opportunity of access to our great national col- lections. It is dated from Farmington, Connecticut, was executed during a nine years' residence in the United States or Canada, and is a product of researches in the libraries of Congress, of the Dominion Parliament, of the State and Provincial Capitols, of the principal American universities and colleges, and other Transatlantic libraries, public and private. It is probable that these sources are

adequate to all requirements, no such difficulties as would attend more purely literary investigations facing one whose labours are politico-economical. The work, which is due to the joint efforts of man and wife, is the result of remarkable we may almost, in these days, say stupendous labour, and contains all that the student can seek to know on the sub- ject. We cannot but hold that the arrangement is not the best conceivable, and offers to all but the exactly informed some needless difficulties. We are all supposed to have at our fingers' ends the main facts of our constitutional history. Mr. Porritt's avowed aim for the conception we, assume to be wholly his is to trace the changes in representation in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, from the time when the English House of Commons first developed a continuous existence until the passing of the great Reform Act of 1832. With the period last named the work begins, and from this standpoint things are dated back. We should have been pleased if an introductory chapter had given a short survey of the rise of Parliament and of representative institutions, if not from the Witenagemot, at least from the summoning of the House of Commons in the middle of the thirteenth century. With the House of Lords in England and Ire- land, except in so far as its relations with the House of Commons extend, Mr. Porritt is not concerned. Books enough on the subject exist, and a reperusal of them is necessary to grasp Mr. Porritt's scheme. Owing to the method adopted, however, we are more interested in individual details than in the main idea, and the book may be more comfortably dipped into than studied. A hundred points of interest might be selected for comment, and a score magazine articles might be extracted from the two volumes by an adroit pilferer. Taking the chapter on ' The Political Relations between Members and Constituents,' it is amusing to see how some of the most insignificant boroughs to be swept away in the Act of 1832 were most insistent on local claims. Burke's assertion that a member elected for Bristol was not member for Bristol, but a member of Par- liament, seems to have found little favour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Very inter- esting is it to see the means of oppression within the reach of corporations, and an intractable voter so late as 1705 was forced into the army and offered his discharge if he would vote as he was told. There are few except professed students of political insti- tutions who could give a definition of a "pot- walloper," or even know that such in the eighteenth century was "every inhabitant of a borough who had a family and boiled a pot there." On the eve of an election a mayor or a corporation was known to swear in freemen in the night in public-houses who had no connexion at all with the borough, but who could be trusted to vote as they were bidden. Of information on matters of this kind the book is a mine. The portion of the second volume dealing with Ireland deserves to be closely studied. An incidental fact of some interest on which we come, taken from a MS. volume in the possession of the late W. M. Torrens, is that "shorthand writers were in the gallery of the [Irish] House of Com- mons " so early as the second half of the eighteenth century.

Traditional Aspects of Hell. By James Mew

(Sonnenschein & Co.)

MR. MEW has issued a volume brief, as he con- fesses, and popular in aim upon a great subject*