Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/190

 270 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9<* s. iv. sEft. so, m gate, was named " for the very antiquitie of the gate it-self," the spelling being merely "for difference sake," to distinguish it from Aldgate. I have myself suggested that the latter name may have been derived from the A.-S. jEI, foreign, and that the gate was so called from the foreigners who, landing with their merchandise at one of the hithes nearer the mouth of the river, conveyed it by land to the eastern entry and thence by the main thoroughfare to Cheap (see ' N. & Q.,' 9th S. i. 2); but this, of course, is only a guess. 11. Jewry Street was formerly known as Poor Jury Lane. Stow, in his ' Survey ' (ed. 1603, p. 56), says :— "At the east end of this laue [i.e., Hart Home Alley] in the way from Aldgate toward the Crossed Friars, of old time were certaine tenements called the poore Jurie, of Jewes dwelling there." There is no doubt that from early times Whitechapel and Aldgate were favourite places of residence amongst the Jewish community. The drift of Me. Davis's queries seems to be the establishment of some connexion between the manor of Blanch Appleton and the district of Whitechapel. I cannot find that any connexion existed, but I will not deny the possibility of it. Proper names have been corrupted in an extraordinary fashion in London. Blanch Appleton itself in the course of centuries became known as Blind Chapel; and Mark Lane, which was one of the boundaries of the manor, is said to have originally been Mart Lane. Further research on the points raised by Mr. Davis is emi- nently desirable. W. F. Prideaux. The First Halfpenny Newspaper (9th S. ii. 504). — Truth, in its issue of the 7 th of September, contains some interesting per- sonal information in reference to the late Albert Grant's connexion with the Echo. It appears that " Baron Grant bought the Echo—then a capital property, without a rival in the trade—from Messrs. Cassell, Fetter & Galpin for 20,000/. He did not make much out of it, for he sold it to Mr. Passmore Edwards for a trifle under what he gave." But within a short time Mr. Ed wards sold it for 80,000^. " Not long afterwards he bought it back again at a trifle higher figure." Under Grant's proprietorship the Echo was brought out as a morning paper—" the pioneer, con- sequently, of halfpenny morning as well as halfpenny evening journalism." Truth states that Grant " was the first person who ever persuaded the morning papers to break their columns for an advertisement"—that is, to extend an advertisement horizontally over the width of two or three columns. Although Baron Grant was a Conservative in politics, he made no attempt to alter the Radical principles of the Echo. John C. Francis. The Dings in York (9th S. iv. 181).—Mr. Boyle's note is interesting in many ways, and I, for one, entirely agree with him. Tnere is no doubt that the dings in York were not military vassals, but shops of some kind. The older explanation can only be accounted for by the fact that the " great man theory " has pervaded every branch of history. As we are now made certain that there were shops at York called dings in the eleventh century, and shops called dj/nges or dinaes at Beverley and Hull in the thirteenth ana fourteenth centuries, we have only to consider the position and the structure of these rooms. Mr. Boyle tells us, rightly no doubt, that the origin of the word is to be sought in the Ola Norse dyngja, though perhaps it should rather be said that dyngja is one of the cognate forms of a word which is found in other Germanic dialects. In Old Norse the word meant (1) a lady's bower; (2) a heap, dung. Sweet gives O.E. *dung, says that M.H.G. tunc means a subterranean room—properly a room covered with dung— for winter use, and especially the subterranean weaving-room, or, as we should say, spinning- house. For the double meaning of the word he refers to Tacitus, 'Germ.,' 16, and Pliny, ' Hist. Nat.,' xix. 1. And he says that if "cave, underground room," is the original meaning, the Greek ra^os, from an Aryan dhnghwos, may be allied. He does not refer, like some other lexicographers, to O.N. dyngja as a cognate word ; but, at any rate, there is not much difference in meaning between the lady's bower and the weaving-room. Then were these Yorkshire dings originally underground shops, or, at all events, shops below the level of the street ? On this point I may be allowed to quote a few lines from my recent book on ' The Evolution of the English House,' in which the references are given :— " In England shops in front of town houses were sometimes known as 'tavern ' from the Latin taberna, and were below the surface of the street, like cellars. They were even known as ' cellars. Thus, by a statute passed in the reign of Henry VIII., merchant gilds were heavily finedif they bound an apprentice by oath or bond not to ' set up, nor kepe any shop, house, or seller.' Cellars were used as places of business in London as early as the first half of the reign of Henry III. We learn from a very full account of the building of a house in Shef- field in 1575 that down to a late time ' taverns' or underground shops were dug out in front of town houses " P. 94.
 * dyng. a prison, as hypothetical forms. KJuge