Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/215

 9* S. IV. Oct. 7, '99.] 291 NOTES AND QUERIES. I notice Deonan-weg, at Cholsey, in Berk- shire. In a description of boundaries given in an Anglo-Saxon charter of the ninth cen- tury* we have "Sonon on Sone holan weg." We still have the name Holloway. Forste- mann, ' Altdeutsches Namenbueh,' quotes Holantvegh from a Gorman document of the tenth century. It is hard to believe that these deep lanes were ever excavated, and yet in the boundaries of the Anglo-Saxon charter just mentioned I find " Sonne on Sone die, Sjer esne Sone weg fordealf." There may have been places where excavation was necessary, but I have never yet seen the traces of a mound by the side of a sunken lane. The antithesis of the sunken lane was the ridge-way, A.-S. hrycg-weg, and it seems to have been the endeavour of road-makers to raise the road, and not to lower it. In the towns of Denmark during the six- teenth century people walked on a high paved way in the middle of the street:— and east of Barnstable, especially in the mining districts of North Molton and Combe Martin, and in the ports and creeks of the Severn Sea, the pedestrian may still trace many deeply sunken lanes —mere cletts, which it is impossible to imagine can have been formed otherwise than by long-continued attrition of the feet of men and cattle for ages ; and yet now they are never used or traversed, and form concealed nooks thickly covered with vegetation, and ferns, particularly the Scolopodcndria, growing in the utmost luxuriance ; and others which, though still in use, bear unmistakable marks of extreme antiquity.1 B. H. L. Die Voriibergehenden hielten sich denn auch draussen in der Mitte der Strasse, welche in die Hohe stieg und sich eiuem Gebirgskamm ahnlich zuspitzte, wo aber doch eine Reihe grosserer tiacher Sterne, die sogenannten ' Biirgermeistersteine,' andeutetcn, wo am besten aufzutreten sei."t This row of big flat stones in the middle of the Danish street is very like the rows of paving-stones in the middle of the old lane which has just been described. S. O. Addy. The following extract from Mr. R. N. Worth's popular ' History of Devonshire,' chap, xiv., may supply some of the information desired on this subject:— " North Devon is so thickly seamed with a net- work of ancient roads, still in use or long abandoned, as to show that it had in pre-Norman times, to dis- tinguish no further, a fairly largo population, dotted in numerous settlements. These ancient trackways are, as a rule, circuitous and have been deeply worn by the traffic of ages, such being the niain characteristics of the proverbial Devonshire lanes. A century since, they were described as rough and rocky; watery and miry in some places, deep and founderous in others; the hills precipitous, and the lanes everywhere narrow, with the hedges on each side too high to afford the traveller any prospect.' Better kept now than then, they still retain their leading features; and those very hedge-banks, ranging even to thirty feet in height, which in the old days had some value in screening the traveller from the sun in summer, and sheltering him from the driving storms in winter, grow more beautiful year by year in their floral car- peting. Mr. J. R. Chanter has further pointed out that' near Bratton, and at several other points north In Sweet's ' Anglo-Saxon Reader,' pt. ii. p. 184. t Troels Lund, 'Das tagliche Leben in Skandina- vien wahrend des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts,' Copen- hagen, 1882, p. 47. " Strenua nos exercet inertia " (9th S. i. 381; ii. 70, 292; iii. 310).—At the first reference I asked for assistance in tracing a rendering of strenua inertia (which I had somewhere seen, but which had escaped me) in the sense not of the usual oxymoron of laborious idle- ness, but of the conservative force which makes change of climate powerless to affect our character, the same simple idea, in fact, as pervades the whole passage and is else- where expressed by Horace in the words " Patriae quis exul se quoque fugit?" Before doing so I consulted various annotated edi- tions of Horace and many translations, without finding the object of my search, and I was careful to produce their testimony against it. Some time has now elapsed ; and, while Mr. Mount has taken the trouble ably and forcibly to state the case against the rendering mooted, limiting the meaning of exercet and ridiculing the idea of vis inertiae in this connexion, no one has helped me to find it, whether for condemnation or approval, and I suppose that I must give it up. I beg, however, to be allowed to refer to a singular communication at the last reference, from Mr. John T. Curry. I am there in- formed that the exprevssion is to be found in Horace's eleventh 'Epistle,' bk. i., the four concluding lines of which are quoted, and that every grammar-school boy used to be familiar with the first line. After this in- sinuation of ignorance on ray part of a passage ray thorough familiarity with which was obvious, the writer proceeds to give some information with which readers of 'N. & Q.' must be well acquainted, and asserts that he has found a note which completely supplies the information required. The note is from Prof. H. Morley's edition of Sir P. Sidney's ' Defence of Poesie,' a wonderful sixpenny- worth of literature with which I was pre- viously unacquainted, and which contains a translation of the lines in question. After Mr. Curry's statement it is difficult to believe that on turning to them one finds nothing in the translation of strenua inertia to suggest