Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/442

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [o s. vn. JUNE i, iwi.

I find that I was misunderstood in saying that I believed Ralph Sneyd of Keele to be Baron Audley by tenure. I ought perhaps to have said that the Sneyds have held for a long time, I believe, the fief of this barony in fact, the Castle of Helegh in the reign of Elizabeth belonged to them. To claim for the Sneyds any right to the peerage of Audley was not, of course, my intention, nor did I think that, strictly speaking, there are any longer barons by tenure ; but, as there were several Alditheleys barons by tenure before Nicholas de Alditheley was sum- moned 1297, and as the Sneyds now hold and have done for a long time the whole or the greater part of the old fief and are really Alditheleys, I thought I might be pardoned for mentioning such uncommon facts.

Some have said that the Alditheleys adopted the arms of the De Verdons of Alton in Staf- fordshire, their chief lords, interchanging the tinctures for difference. There is no absolute proof of this, although it is not unlikely. They were not descended from the Verdons in the male line, and as yet I have never seen any proof worthy of consideration that they were in the female line. The first Adam de Aldithelega was the son of Gamel the Saxon, Domesday holder of Alditheley. Liulf de Aldredeslega, who, according to the Staffordshire Pipe Roll of 1129, lay under a charge for the murder of Gamel, was not of this family at all, but was called Aldredeslega from Alderley, two miles north of Leek. Nor was the murdered Gamel the Domesday 1086 owner of Alditheley, near Newcastle, but was Gamel of Tettesworth, which is about a mile from Alderley ; and the murder, according to tradition, took place in Solomon's Hollow two miles from Leek on the Leek and Buxton road. How easily antiquaries follow one another in any assumption ! One would have thought that any Anglo-Saxon scholar would have seen at a glance that the place- name Aldredeslega was not the same as Aldithelega. The end of each is the same the beginning of one is a man's name the beginning of the other is a woman's In proof of this it may be noticed that Aldredeslega is the Domesday spelling of Alderley in Cheshire, showing that in those early times Alderley, near Leek in Stafford- shire, would appear in the Pipe Roll in the form Aldredeslega. Further, the very charge for the murder is peculiar, including as it does ten hawks and ten deerhounds, pointing I think, to the situation of Alderley and Tettesworth, which were in the Forest of Leek and Macclesfield. G. SNEYD.

Chastleton Rectory.

ST. CHRISTOPHER AND LAUGHTER (9 th S. vii. 247, 356). In an undated and anonymous booklet published by James Burns, ' St. Christopher : a Painting in Ford holme Church,' will be found the legend very beautifully told for children. My copy is bound up with a number of tracts, mostly by F. W. Faber, and all dated in the thirties and early forties. From the B.M. Catalogue I see that the Ven. John Allen, Archdeacon of Salop, was the author, and that the little work was republished in 1899. In the Penny Post, vol. xxx. (1880), pp. 250, 278, there are references to the above and other versions of the legend. J. P. OWEN.

SIR SIMEON STEWARD (9 th S. vii. 367). An account of this poet is given in the ' Dictionary of National Biography.' He was akin to Elizabeth Steward, the mother of Oliver Cromwell, and is supposed to have died about 1629. The son of Sir Mark Steward by his wife Anna, the daughter of Dr, Robert Huick, one of Queen Elizabeth's physicians, he was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he lived for many years. The ' D.N.B.' concludes :

"Inspired, it would appear, by Spenser and Shakespeare, he wrote a graceful poem called ' The Faery King.' This appeared under his name in a volume entitled ' A .Description of the King & Queene of Fayries. Their Habit, Fare, their Abode, Pompe, & State' (London, for Richard Harper, 1635, 8vo). Steward's contribution to the volume was reprinted in 'Musarum. Deliciffi' (1656), and in the rare volume of 'Bibliographical Miscellanies' printed at Oxford in 1813 by Dr. Bliss, who made several MS. notes relating to ' The Faery King ' in his copy, now in the B.M. The version he prints was discovered by him among the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian, and differs in numerous points from that in the ' Musarum Deliciae.' Steward's poem reappeared in Mr. A. E. Waite's selection of fairy poems, entitled 'Elfin Music' (London, 1888, 12m o)."

A. R. BAYLEY.

For the author of ' The Faery King ' and other poems, references to this knight and his family, see 7 th S. iii. 326 ; 8 th S. v. 169, 194.

EVERARD HOME COLEMAN. 71, Brecknock Road.

BONAPARTE BALLAD (9 th S. vi. 349 ; vii. 193, 295). The late Walter Thornbury, in his 'Criss-Cross Journeys,' published in 1873, gives these stanzas as sung by a Texan ranger on the voyage from Liverpool to New York after a holiday in England. Thornbury says (vol. i. p. 98) :

" Before I leave Amos I must give one of his

most curious songs one to which I attach value ; a singular example of the gradual corruption of ballads when orally handed down, and also a curious