Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/278

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. v. APRIL 7, 1900.

'Ireland' by Mr. and Mrs. Hall. At Mr. Croker's sale it was purchased by Mr. T. Bateman, of Lomberdale House, and placed in his museum, and an illustration appears in the Catalogue. It is noticed in Carl Engel's Catalogue of the South Kensington instru- ments ; and at the dispersal of Mr. Bateman's collection by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, in June, 1893, it was No. 292 in the Catalogue. The writer has particulars of all the known specimens of the Irish harp with the exception of this instrument by John Kelly, and will be obliged if any of your readers can supply him with the name and address of the present possessor. The forma- tion, ornamentation, number, and length of strings, and measurements are of importance ; and as the possessors of all the other known specimens have either given or allowed the writer to obtain the information, he hopes the possessor of this harp will be good enough to do so also. There is no other known specimen of a harp by John Kelly. The illus- tration in Walker's 'Irish Bards' badly re- produced by Ledwich, is of one which cannot now be traced. ROBERT B. ARMSTRONG. 6, Randolph Cliff, Edinburgh.

MAIL SHIRTS FROM THE SOUDAN.

(9 th S. v. 183.)

As one who has often worn a mediaeval shirt of mail (borrowed from the Tower, where a number of those fine garments were still in being, as is the case now no doubt), I may demur to THORNFIELD'S description of the manner in which the ends of the rings of the specimen to which he refers "were fastened together by a small rivet." After very careful examinations of similar relics, using a magnifying glass and even a micro- scope for the purpose, I have concluded that the ends of the rings were really, after flattening, welded together on an indented anvil, and that no rivet was used or even needed. The indents in the anvils on which these links were formed, having small sunk spaces in their centres, would produce the little nipple -like protuberances which are easily mistaken for the heads of rivets. The objects of forming the rings thus seem to be, by increasing the cohering surfaces, to secure greater strength for the welds, to reduce the number of parts constituting the whole, to ensure simplicity of manufacture, to lessen the weight of the hauberk, and so greatly to facilitate the making of it that, witn a single blow of his hammer on each ring, a deft

armourer would weld them with almost in- credible rapidity. The indent of the anvil received, it seems to me, the whole ring at once; each ring should be of an irregular oval form nothing like a circle.

Having examined a considerable number of ancient pieces of the so-called "chain- mail" and inquired into their history, I presume that all the finer specimens were made in the East, probably at Damascus, if not at ancient Cairo. No choice instances are known to me, or, so far as I am aware, represented on monuments of stone or in brasses, older than the end of the eleventh century, if, by many decades, so old. All older relics of this nature were tegulated, " banded," or formed of rings sewn on shirts of leather. Clumsy imitations of the true "chain-mail" are known, both ancient and modern, and usually consist of circular rings whose ends are, as goldsmiths say, "jumped" together, i.e., not welded, but simply brought face to face. Indian or Persian mail is not difficult of recognition by experts. Some specimens of these sorts may be ancient, but no doubt the majority of them are not so, if not quite modern. I submitted these notions as to the manner in which the real "chain-mail" brought to the West by the Crusaders was formed to the late William Burges, A.R. A., without careful reference to wnose book, produced in conjunction with the Baron de Cosson, and entitled 'Ancient Helmets and Examples of Mail,' 1881, no man ought to presume to write, or even to think, about mail, its manufacture and history. On the subject of mail- wearing in the Soudan, see a letter from a military correspondent to the Times, 3 September, 1883, and dated Khartoum, 30 July preceding. This was before the destruction of Hicks Pasha's army, and, of course, before the betrayal of Gordon. Since these dates several notices have ap- peared certifying to the use of mail by savage warriors in the same regions. The question remains, however, What sort of mail did, or do, they wear? F. G. STEPHENS.

'DR. SYNTAX' (9 th S. v. 8, 151). Combe was close on seventy when he produced his famous work. It first appeared in Ackermann's Poetical Magazine, though afterwards re- published in book form. Says Leigh Hunt (in his ' Hundred Romances of Real Life ') :

"Rowlandson had offered to Mr. Ackermann a number of drawings representing an old clergyman

and schoolmaster quixotically travelling in

search of the picturesque. As the drawings needed the explanation of letterpress, Mr. Ackermann declined to purchase them, unless he should find