Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/279

 vii. APRIL 6, loci.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

271

SURNAMES (9 th S. vii. 28, 98, 235). A corre- spondent thinks it worth while to favour ' N. & Q.' with the fond fancies of a vener- able friend about his own surname, to the effect that " Prynne is the only family name which occurs in the ' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is the oldest historical record we have of English history. It was, it appears, the family name of the last king of Kent." Now, really, your correspondent ought to have turned up the 'Chronicle' before inflicting these venerable figments upon ' N. & Q.' He would have found that the last king of Kent in 794 was " Eadbryht, j?am was oj>er noma nemned Prsen " ; and a high-school girl would have told him that Preen was not a " family name," and that Preen was not and could not have become Prynne. But much allowance is to be made for people, venerable or other, when they ruminate upon their family name. I had a respected friend surnamed Catlin, who believed that he was descended from a Roman Catiline not the notorious one com- memorated by Sallust, but " another man of the same name " who came to Britain with Julius Caesar, stayed behind when the Romans left the island, married a British heiress, and bequeathed his cognomen as a surname to his descendants, who, my in- formant added with feeling, "have never been very numerous." And I knew a re- spectable, if humble family surnamed Salaam, who carried their ancestry much farther back. My wife once had a member of this family as maid, and this maid confided to a fellow-servant the notable fact that her great-grandfather once owned an ass that spoke. "It was perfectly true, for it said so in the Bible ; her father had once shown her the place where it told all about it, and he said that that was his own grandfather." Un- fortunately she could not now find the place in the Bible, and the fellow-servant, being of a sceptical turn, disbelieved that any ass ever spoke, and appealed to her mistress. The latter showed her the place in the Bible, but told her that that happened long ago in the days of miracles ; she feared it was too long ago for these Balaams to be connected ; she suspected if there was any connexion it was with the ass rather than the pro- phet. A worthy Scotch friend of mine from Aberdeenshire claims to belong by lineal descent to the oldest family in the world, before which Balaams and Catlins, and even Prynnes, must bare reverent heads. His sur- name is Adam. I suspect that his descent from Adam is a good deal more certain than that of the Prynnes from Prsen. A geologist, however, reminds me of a much earlier

ancestral being, called flozoon, down in the Lauren tian rocks. He adds that there are still flagons in the * London Directory.' If ' N. & Q.' is really going in for this sort of thing, why should it bother about Prsen and the Prynnes, who, like the rest of us, "are of yesterday, and know nothing," when so much may be said, etymologically and his- torically, for the venerable flozoon and the Easons? J. A. H. MURRAY.

Oxford.

P.S. For the sake of the sober antiquary, I may add that I afterwards incidentally came across the name of a former member of the Balaam family under the spelling Bal- ham. The analogy of Clapham, Hatcham, Peckham, and thousands of other surnames derived from place-names inclines one to take this as the original form. But Balaam used to be pronounced like Balham or Bahlam (ray grandmother said the latter), and probably some parish clerk who had to enter the name took it upon him to conform it to the Bible spelling.

One surname was extinguished by an Act of the Scottish Parliament abolishing for ever the name of Ruthven (and decreeing that the barony of Ruthven should be known as the barony of Huntingtower) in conse- quence of the attack on King James by Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, in August, 1600.

R. B.

Upton.

ST. PATRICK'S DAY (9 th S. vii. 223). The four-leaved shamrock is, I suppose, the four- leaved clover, though it is by no means certain that the true shamrock was a clover. For its ' special significance " see Folkard's ' Plant- Lore' or Friend's ' Flowers and Flower-Lore.' It is scarcely worth while to burden the columns of ' N. & Q.' with what is so easily accessible in all books of the class^ of^ those referred to. C. C. B.

VULGAR MISUSE OF "RIGHT" (9 th S. vii. 49). The word is in general use here in the sense given in the quotations by F. H. We say a oerson "has no right" to do a certain thing. [ do not think it vulgar or a misuse ; ^it may 36 provincial. H. B R.

South Shields.

"HUTCHING ABOUT" (9 th S. vii. 165). If LINCOLN GREEN heard this expression for the first time in Lincolnshire but a few days ago. he must pardon me for saying that his verdancy is not autochthonic. To me it seems both familiar and satisfactory, and I confess I am disappointed to find that MR.