Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/48

 32 [9th S. IV. July 8, '99. NOTES AND QUERIES. ings and Tickhill as right " Alicie, Comitisse de Deu, proa vise suae." She was, he says, seized temp- Henry III., and left England, giving up Hastings to the king until peace with France. Thereafter, 36 Henry III., protec- tion was given to all lands of said countess, Rot. Pari. 18 Edward I. The Binghams were doubtless a branch of the Buslis. Hugh de Bingham, who lived at Bingham in 1199, was great-grandson of Richard de Builli, co- Founder of the Cistercian house of Roche in 1147. So ' The Norman People.' T. W. Aston Clinton. Bingham was Bugge, from Ralph of Bugge Hall, a wealthy woolstapler of Nottingham, a.d. 1235. Of his two sons Richard became of Willoughby in the Wolds, now represented in the female line by Lord Middleton ; another son settled at Bingham. His family is distinct from the Dorset line of Sutton Bingham, Welcome or Melcome Bingham, now represented by the Earl of Lucan. A. Hall. "Bailey" (9th S. iii. 2G9, 293, 433).—An old building near the parish church of Rumney, Monmouthshire, is known as "Beili Bach," i.e., the Little Bailey. It was probably the residence of the bailiff of the manor of Rempny. A portion of the precincts of Cardiff Castle was termed the Castle Bailey down to the seventeenth century. The Bailey is still the name of a street in the old part of Swansea, near the Castle. I wonder if I shall be scolded for hazarding a conjec- ture that the Irish baile (Bally-) is a cognate word. John Hobson Matthews. Town Hall, Cardiff. "Mead and Obarni" (9th S. iii. 306, 413, 471).—Mr. Strong, if I understand him rightly, denies the existence of Russian obarni. I regret I did not give my authority for it in my first letter ; it is Pawlowsky's ' Russisch-Deutsches Worterbuch,' Riga, 1879, p. 580. There are, in fact, three alternative forms of the word, obarni, obvarni, and ob- iHirnoi. While writing I may as well add that my attention has just been drawn to the fact that although the 'Stanford Dictionary ' does not give cherunk in the body of the work, it occurs in the supplement. It is there said to be Russian, and a very interest- ing quotation is given (from Hakluyt) in which the word is spelt cherevnikyna, and Interpreted as mead made of the wild black cherry. James Platt, .Tun. It may perhaps be worth noting that there are two articles about this word in the 'Stanford Dictionary.' Mr. Platt appears only to have seen the one in the text, not that in the supplement. The latter gives additional evidence of the use of the word in Elizabethan literature, but no attempt at etymology ; so that Me. Platt may justly claim to be the first who has fully explained it. Wm. C. Richardson. Prior's Parentage (9th S. iii. 449).—Horace Walpole's suggestion does not exist outside his own letter to Mann. It would be difficult to know on what ground it rested. Accord- ing to Johnson, Prior left his birth for future biographers to speculate upon, hoping that they might give him a more notable descent than he could claim. This is certainly un- fortunate, but it does not add a grain of possibility to Walpole's suggestion. The main facts have not been seriously questioned. There is little doubt that Prior was born at Wimborne, in East Dorset; and it is pro- bable that his parents were Nonconformists, a fact which accounts for the absence of any register of his baptism at Wimborne. The ' Dictionary of National Biography ' quotes two lines of his which favour this view. His father was Ceorge Prior, a joiner by trade, who died when Matthew was very young. The boy was then taken in hand by his uncle, a vintner in London, and it was here that the Earl of Dorset first came across Jiiin. Other facts tend to prove the absurdity of Walpole's suggestion. Take Prior's dedication of his poems to Lionel, seventh Earl and first Duke of Dorset. It is nothing but a high- flown eulogy of his patron, the late earl. But there is not a word in it that could be twisted by the most malignant Whig into a belief that Charles, sixth Earl of Dorset, was Prior's father-. If such had been the case the whole thing would have been most improper, and would not have lacked an earlier Walpole to expose it. In 1064, the date of Prior's birth, Charles Sackville, then Lord Buck- hurst, was sowing the wildest oats with Sir C. Sedley and others in London. The next year he was at the war-, and writing " To all you Ladies." He was twenty-six and un- married. His only son, Lionel Cranfield Sackville, was born of his second marriage, in 1688. Swift in the 'Journal to Stella' makes many allusions to Prior. After the latter had arranged " Matt's Peace," and become thereupon a plenipotentiary for the Utrecht negotiations, Swift hints pretty broadly his wonder that Lord Strafford, another pleni- potentiary "as proud as hell," could consent to serve with one of Prior's low birth. As a matter of fact Strafford refused, and Prior