Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/353

 <> s. xii. OCT. 31, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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and three Coome over, ten quarters and a halfe to the Last. I have not, my Lord, been silent at soe much want of measure at Lyn, but, my Lord, the Bushell in Norffolke is a pirite biger then that in Chambridge sheire, and strooke there with a Rolle (w ch presses downe Corne) and noe where else, besides, my Lord, Oats never hold out the same measure twice together, but every time fall shorter. If noe wronge was done at Wisbeech, the Oats will hold out, my Lord, at London Ten quarters and two bushells for every last, and noe more as 1 am adver- tised, eight bushells to the quarter and as many gallons to the bushell. I receaved not your Grace's Letter till the last night and this is the soonest accompt could be given by, My Lord, Your Grace's most obedient servant, J. WBENHAM.

, Sutton Marsh, May 11, 1690 [1670 ?].

If I mistake not, discrepancies not alto- gether unlike those which exercised the mind of this careful steward still remain to be swept away at some far distant date by the adoption in this country of the metrical system. J. ELIOT HODGKIN.

THE TAX ON BRICKS. The Spectator in a recent article by Sir W. Laird Clowes on a MS. diary kept by James Cobb, the secretary of the East India Company, during a driving tour through the Midland counties, remarks with regard to an evasion of taxation on certain articles :

" There was a tax on bricks, but the size of the bricks was not specified. The result was that the builders used bricks of huge proportions, and the lower walls of the cellars of some of the houses on the south side of Brunswick Square are constructed of these larger bricks. The upper walls, built, I understand, after the tax had been taken off, are of the ordinary dimensions."

This is inaccurate ; it was not till the close of the eighteenth century that bricks were sub- jected to taxation. By the Act 24 George III. (1784), c. 24, a duty of 2s. 6d. a thousand was imposed upon bricks. By 43 George III., c. 69, bricks were divided for fiscal purposes into common and dressed bricks, and separate rates of duty were imposed on each kind, the duty being regulated by the size of the bricks. These duties were as follows : For every thousand bricks which shall be made in Great Britain, not exceeding any of the fol- lowing dimensions, that is to say, ten inches long, three inches thick, and five inches wide, 5s. ; for every thousand of bricks which shall be made in Great Britain, exceeding any of the foregoing dimensions, 10s. The duty on the larger bricks was double that imposed upon the ordinary kind. . By 3 Will. IV., c. 11 (1833), the duties on tiles were wholly repealed, and the duty on common bricks was raised to 5s. Wd. per thousand.

The brick duties formed the subject of a report by the Commissioners of Excise in

1836, and in 1839 the whole of the existing duties were repealed by 2 and 3 Viet., c. 24, and a uniform duty of 5s. lOd. imposed upon all bricks of which the cubic content did not exceed 150 cubic inches, without dis- tinction as to shape or quality. The duty on bricks was removed in 1850. JOHN HEBB.

THE WYKEHAMICAL WORD "TOYS." Among the " notions " in use at Winchester College at the end of the nineteenth century was the word " toys," as the name of a kind of cupboard in which the boys kept, not merely their playthings, such as a French- man might call jouet or joujou, but the implements of learning and study. A Win- chester scholar was called in former times "a childe of ye colledge"; but in the nine- teenth century he claimed to be called "a Winchester man." It seems unlikely that the name of the piece of furniture in question would have such purely infantine associations as the common English "toys." May the Wykehamists of former times have got it from Danish-Norwegian, in which toi or toi means "stuff, matter, baggage, equipage, apparatus, implements," to quote the common but unsatisfactory dictionary of Otto Holtze? In this toihus also occurs as meaning " arsenal, armory."

E. S. DODGSON.

FICTITIOUS LATIN PLURALS. Oddities such as apparati, apparata, and ignorami have ere while been held up to ridicule in your pages, but I am not sure that rhinoceri has figured with them, although more than one instance thereof has come before me, the latest being furnished by the Daily Mail of 14 September, in an article at p. 7, headed 1 Animal Partners,' by the Rev. Theodore Wood. For the amusement of your readers I quote the sentence that contains the erring word : " There is a bird in Africa which seems to exist for the sole purpose of ridding rhinoceri of ticks." The ignorance here exhibited is refreshing. The writer's notion of Latin is that nouns in -us make their plurals in -i, which, as your readers know, is true only of the second declension, and as he regarded rhinocerus as a noun of that declen- sion he pluralized it in accordance with his notion. But rhinocerus has no lexical exist- ence. The name of the pachyderm he had in mind is rhinoceros, of which the plural is rhinocerotes in Latin and rhinoceroses in English.

A yet greater monstrosity was recently shown to me in a proof-sheet of a monthly review which had been returned for press with the phrase ipsissimce verbce, in italic