Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/494

 410 NOTES AND QUERIES. P» s. VL NOV. 24,1900. was in the parish of Bulkington, but I ana informed that the registers of that parish do not contain any Barnacle entries. A. T. M. "MiTHERED"is a word in common use in this part of Warwickshire in the sense of being confused or bothered. "Don't mither me, I am bothered enough now "; "I am that mithered I don't know what I am doing." I cannot find any reference to the word. J. A. Coventry. ["Mither —to smother, encumber, muffle up. Northampt." See Wright and Halliwell.] LIEUT. - COL. MOORHOUSE. — Can any in- formation be given as to the family or descendants of Lieut. - Col. Joseph Moor- housOj Madras Artillery, who was killed at the siege of Bangalore on 7 March, 1791 ? He was buried at Madras in October, 1791. and a mural monument (by Peart) was erected to his memory in St. Mary's Church, Fort St. George, Madras, with the following in- scription :— " By order of the Court of Directors I of the East India Company | to commemorate the dis- tinguished Services, | of the late [ Joseph Moor- house Esqr | Lieutenant Colonel of the Coaat Artillery: | who was killed at the | Attack of the Pettah Gate of | Bangajore, | on the Seventh Day of March | Anno Domini | MDCCXCI." J. H. L. AGRICULTURAL DESCRIPTIVE KIMES. — I shall be glad if correspondents will note references to what might be termed technical agriculture in poetry. As an illustration I note the following ; its authorship, and from what source drawn, are, however, unknown to me:— With wholesome fare our villa 's stored ; Our lands the best of corn afford ; Not Hertford wheat, nor Derby rye, Nor Ipswich pease, can ours outvye ; The largest ox that England bred Was in our verdant pastures fed. Technical agricultural references are to be found, I believe, mostly in minor rural poets —those that might be termed "county" poets especially, lleferences to local descrip- tive agricultural effusions by forgotten or unknown minor—perhaps very minor—poets will be welcome. Ji. HEDGER WALLACE. Glcncara, Harpeuden. WORCESTERSHIRE FOLK-LORE.—The owner of a property in this county had recently a bailiff and a groom, who lived in houses a few hundred yards apart. The groom was discharged, his conduct not being satis- factory. It is thought that he picked up the idea that the bailiff had manoeuvred him out of his place. After he had departed a letter was delivered by post to the bailiff in an unknown hand, but thought to be sent by the groom. The envelope contained a crumb of bread, a small piece of earth, an inch or two of string, and an empty pea-pod. Can any correspondent throw light on this mysterious communication, which seems to savour of a writing on the wall or a symbol language which is unknown to me ? W. H. QUARRELL. LATIN LINES.—Many years ago I remember reading the following lines, or something like them :— Dixit Abbas ad Priorem, Tu es homo boni [?] moriim Quia semper nieliorum Mini das consilia. Can any one kindly inform me where the original is to be found 1 WHIM. "QUARTER" OF CORN. (9th S. v. 456 ; vi. 32, 253, 310.) DR. MURRAY, replying to a question on the meaning of the quarter, corn-measure, rightly recognizes it as the quarter of a chaldron, but he assumes that it is so at present as well as in a distant past. He takes for granted that in the imperial measures of capacity the largest unit recognized by English law is the chaldron of 32 bushels, and that the answer to the question, " A quarter of what ?" could be obtained at once from an arithmetic book or a boy's table of weights and measures. Now, if I am not mistaken, the chaldron has for more than five centuries been, legally, a measure of 3G bushels. In consequence of this change, and the penalties imposed by statute on the efforts made to adapt the quarter to the altered chaldron, the latter dropped out as a corn-measure, surviving only as a measure for coal, and now practically as a measure for coke, one chaldron of which is, I believe, con- sidered as the product of a ton of coal. Consequently, from Recordo(1543) to Whit- aker (1900) there is scarcely any mention of the chaldron as a corn-measure. In only one table of measures have I found it: in Hylles's 'Arte of Vulgar Arithmeticke'(lGOO), 8 bushels make 1 quarter, 4 quarters 1 chalder, 5 qlwr ters 1 wey. But 4 quarters did not make a chaTk|C in 1600 ; and in 1707 the chaldron had so far died out as a corn-measure that Bishop Fleet- wood ('Chronicon Pretiosum') says, doubt- less a Quarter is a quarter or fourth part of some load or weight.