Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/199

 9* S. IV. Sept. 30, '99.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 279 as that of the newest arrival from the interior of Merioneth. I speak not only of the form of his sentences, but of his pronunciation. Even the trade terms and other words which he had picked up in the course of his work suffered in his mouth a Cymric change into something rich and strange. C. C. B. Epworth. Housen is frequently used in West Corn- wall as the plural of home. W. Roberts. Housen and placen=" houses " (not neces- sarily publics) and " places," obtain at Ketton, Rutland. The two words have been familiar to me for many years. F. Coventry. Ketton, Stamford. In Charles Kingsley's ' Alton Locke,' chap, xii., Farmer, or as he preferred to style himself " yooman," Porter says to Alton, speaking of " Lunnon " :— " Never to goo ayond the housen !—never to goo ayond the housen ! Kill me in a three months, that would!" Jonathan Bouchier. Ropley, Hants. List of Knights (9th S. iii. 427, 493).—It is worth while recording, in connexion with this subject, that the late Sir Thomas 1'hillipps printed at his Middle Hill Press in 1853 a list of knights made by Charles I. from March, 1625, to 1646 (Ex. Harl. MSS. 939, 6062, and 6832), which supplies the link between the two lists of Philpot and Townsend. There is a copy of this list in the B.M. W. Roberts. fflisctlhnrous NOTES ON BOOKS, &o. The Registers of Whkkham in the Comity of Dur- ham. — Marriage*. 1579-1S12. Transcribed, in- dexed, and edited by Herbert Maxwell Wood, B.A. (Sunderland, Hills & Co.) Whickham stands on a hill overhanging the lower valley in which the Tyne flows. The fact that Sir Ambrose Crowley's ironworks were established here late in the seventeenth century gives to the parish a place in the industrial history of the North. The population at that time must have been a mixed one, for we hear that hundreds of men were brought thither from the south of England, and some even from Spain and Germany. 1 he marriage registers furnish little evidence of this infusion of foreign blood. We have looked almost in vain for names which may be regarded as German or Spanish. Probably nearly all the new-comers were working men, who were willing to forget or translate their patronymics, and thus render the identification of their nationality impossible. In 1693 a "John Herman Dalhusius" was married to Jane Grainge. The husband may well have been a man of superior class, perhaps a clerk, paymaster, or overlooker. These registers abound with well-known Border names. We find Greys, Fenwicks, Forsters, Swin- burns, Grahams, and Ordes in profusion, but there is not in the index one solitary Heron. Some few of the surnames are not a little curious. In 1706 we encounter a woman who went by the name of Jane Baptize, and in the following year William Baptize (no doubt a kinsman) married Barbary Crisope. It is a mere guess, but we would suggest that this is an attempt at a translation of some foreign name. Earsmith occurs on two occasions, and Elf once. What can have been the origin of this latter name? It can have no connexion with the wandering spirits who Gamboll'd on heaths, and danced on ev*ry green. There is a single instance of the name Gatehouse. We never met with it before; but in a country where in former days every residence of any pre- tension was fortified, we should not have been surprised if it had been common. Mayotos, Kaugho, and Parliament each occur once only. As Parlia- ment is found in 1608, it is probably too early to be a nickname. The almost entire absence of those Old Testament Christian names in which we were formerly told the Puritans delighted is noteworthy, as is also the not infrequent occurrence of Florence as a female name. Common as it now is, it was almost unknown in many parts of England before the time of the Crimean war. A few strange Chris- tian names are perhaps worthy of note. Flanders as a woman's name occurs in 1579 and 1601. Eccho was borne by a man in 1645, and Jandes by a woman in 1682. Geyle and Trothy, both of them women, flourished, the former in 1628, the latter in 1749. We trust the work will soon be rendered complete by the addition of the baptisms and burials. The printing is excellent, and the index well arranged • and very accurate. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. Arranged and catalogued by James Gairdner, LL. 1).. and R. H. Brodie. -Vols. XIV. (two parte), XV., XVI., 1539-1541. (Stationery Office.) The volumes of this great series appear far more rapidly than those who know the many difficulties which beset the calendarers have any right to hope for, and this is especially the case as regards those relating to the reign of Henry VIII., for they are compiled on a different and more comprehensive plan than those of later reigns. Here we have a key not only to such documents as have found a resting- place in the Public Record Office, but also to others bearing on the period which are preserved in the British Museum and elsewhere. When the series is complete down to the death of the king we shall, for the first time, be able to arrive at a firm con- clusion as to what was his real character as a sovereign and as a man, and it will be for evermore impossible for those who can weigh evidence to regard him either as a stern patriot or an heroic deliverer of his country from foreign usurpation and domestic abuses which had become intolerable. Had the struggle for the first divorce stood alone, much that the late Mr. Froude has said of him might perhaps be received as a not improbable explanation of the king's actions; but nis later conduct casts a light so lurid on what had occurred before that nov to accept his plea of a troubled conscience is little short of a manifest absurdity.