Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/240

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

in. MAR. 25,

remember that it appeared at Christmas time, and cost five shillings, I shall be glad of any information respecting the contents of the volume, and the dates of its first and last appearance before the public.

HENRY GERALD HOPE. Clapham, S.W.

SIRDAR (9 th S. iii. 164). It would be inter- esting to know the authority on which the Boy's Own Paper states that Lord Kitchener, who is understood to be an Arabic scholar, pronounces his title of Sirdar with the accent on the first syllable. The question, however, is which is correct, Sirdar or Sirdar? Neither, strictly speaking, is correct. The correct word is Sarddr, with, of course, the accent on the second syllable. It literally means a headman, from the Persian sar, a head. The last syllable, ddr, we find in the common words Havildar, Jemadar, Subadar, which under the Mughal emperors of Delhi had a far more extended signification than they now possess as the designations of the native officers in the Indian army. The writer in the Boy's Own Paper evidently does not know that the alphabetic structure of the Arabic and Persian languages does not admit of mis- pronunciation in the manner stated to be indulged in by Lord Kitchener.

W. F. PRIDEAUX.

MARY ELEANOR BOWES, LADY STRATHMORE (9 th S. iii. 168). In Evans's 'Catalogue of Portraits,' vol. i., appears the item : " Strath- more, Mary Eleanor, Countess of, co. Durham, 4to., Is., Trotter." Any good British peerage will show the family descent to the present Earl of Strathmore, including the romantic mar- riage of the tenth earl (Mary Eleanor's eldest son) on his deathbed to Mary Milner. M. B. W. will find much information respecting the countess in Jesse Foot's ' Lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq., and the Countess of Strathmore.' RICHD. WELFORD.

ERA IN ENGLISH MONKISH CHRONOLOGY (8 th S. xi. 387 ; xii. 421, 466 ; 9 th S. i. 10, 92, 231 ; ii. 29, 292, 473 ; iii. 73). I am compelled to trespass again upon these pages in con- nexion with this futile controversy, which, as I said in my first note, is founded by MR. ANSCOMBE upon a misapprehension of the object of the note in the ' Crawford Charters ' impugned by him. I have in vain tried to explain to him that the note referred to the use of the era " for the dating of legal and historical documents," and that its use in the Easter tables of Dionysius does not constitute it an era in the sense in which this word was used in the ' Crawford

Charters.' I have exposed the fallacy of the argument that the use of the Dionysian table is proof of the use of the era of the Incarna- tion in the sense defined above, by pointing out that this argument would prove that the era in question was the legal or ecclesiastical era used in Rome in the sixth century, whereas it did not acquire that character until after the eleventh century. The era used by the Popes continued to be the Justinian reckon- ing by the imperial and consular years and the indictions until the time of Hadrian I. (772-95), when the connexion with Byzantium ceased. This was, as I have shown, the system of dating employed by Gregory I., and it must have been the era that Augustine, as a Roman citizen, would have employed. Kemble has unfortunately obscured this point by his unpardonable blunder of saying that Gregory's bulls in Beda are dated by the era of the Incarnation. This blunder has affected his conclusions, and it has influenced Prof. Riihl. But the latter, although thus misled, has made the distinction that MR. ANSCOMBE refuses to see the distinction be- tween the use of the word " era " in its strict sense and in a loose sense. By the latter we might describe the system used by Dionysius as an "era" in the year in which it was first written down by him as an innovation in the margin of his tables. Using the word in its strict sense, we cannot speak of the use of this era in Rome until the eleventh century. Now when Riihl speaks of St. Augustine's bringing into England the Dionysian era with the Dionysian tables, it is evident that he is using " era " in the loose sense, for he continues that the era was " first practically used by the Anglo-Saxons." By this he necessarily implies that it was not "prac- tically used" by St. Augustine. In other words, it was not used by Augustine as an era in the strict sense of the word, and it was so first used by the Anglo-Saxons. This is why I said that Riihl's statement "in no way controverted" my contention, MR. ANSCOMBE charges me with advancing this latter state- ment, although I knew that I was wrong, because I would not confess my error. I mention this as an excuse for having to dilate upon a subject so well known to chronologists as the two uses of the word " era."

MR. ANSCOMBE'S methods of conducting a discussion may be estimated by the latter part of his note. In my last note I care- lessly spoke of the chronicle appended to Beda's 'Liber de Ratione Temporum,' written in 725, the date specified by me, as the ' Chronica Minora ' instead of the ' Chronica Majora,' the former being the name given to