Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/262

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. vm. SEPT. 21, 1901.

fought near Aldborough (Isurium), on the other hand, appears more likely for the reasons he gives. Simeon of Durham is the only later chronicler who evidently knew actually where the battlefield was, and we may infer that it was much further north still.

Skene was led to fix upon Aldborough from the fact of the number of the Roman roads leading thereto, which would have been used by the king's allied enemies coming from the Irish Sea and the German Ocean.

Now in Dumfriesshire is a point to which similarly divers Roman roads converge under that lofty and isolated hill crowned with earthworks called Brunswark or Birrens- wark. Was this the "Brunnanwerc" of Simeon 1

It is remarkable that Gaimar, who fre- quently gives particulars referring to North- umbrian history not to be found elsewhere, actually spells the word "Bruneswerce." One MS. reads " Brunewerche " (' Mon. Hist. Brit.,' p. 808). I admit that the original statement copied by most of the chroniclers, that the Danish King of Dublin, Anlaf, sailed up the Humber, is somewhat against this locality. But supposing Brunswark were the scene of this memorable conflict, Anlaf more likely crossed the Irish Sea and landed in Sol way Firth. In that case Carlisle would have been the city yEthelstan had reached a day or two before the battle, and where Anlaf, disguised as a harper, gained the king's presence. It will be remembered the saga makes Anlaf accept the king's guerdon, which, disdaining to keep, he buried in the sand on his way back to his camp. Carlisle fulfils these conditions, being near the sandy shores of Solway Firth. The Anglo-Saxon song says after the battle the defeated Anlaf sailed for Dublin.

yEthelstan's route from the South appears to have been through Lindsey, across the Humber to Beverley, then to Ripon by York Further north it is only conjectural, but Possibly by Durham and Hexham to the Roman Wall, then following it towards Car- The late Canon Raine in the last book

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aRSSykSfflSfi^ 1 ?

If the record he refers to be the one printed


 * ]!?x - Mona A tlcon (old edition, vol ii

p. 367) from Cotton MS., Nero D III it

hardly goes as far as that, though it clearly states that the king had entered Scotland before the encounter. YEthelstan seems to have gone to Dunbar after the battle, where he is said to have performed the very dexterous feat described, which the Scottisn historians never refer to, so far as I am aware, possibly on account of its being then put forth as a sign from Heaven to prove his right to dominion over the kings of Scotland ! "Weondune," also mentioned by Simeon of Durham, may have been the name of the actual battlestead, but unused, as not so well known as Brunnanwerc a great landmark and the natural feature of the neighbour- hood, an everlasting memorial of the historic event fought out at its foot.

That Yorkshire was the scene of the battle seems altogether very probable, and the matter was elaborately discussed years ago in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Mercury without any result. Brough-on-the-Humber, Burnom (Nun-burnholme), Little Weighton, near Beverley, and Bramham Moor have all had advocates. I have not had an oppor- tunity of reading Sir James Ramsay's argu- ments in favour of Bourne. A. S. ELLIS.

Westminster.

"LEET-ALE" (9 th S. viii. 203). Charles Annandale, in Dr. Ogilvie's 'Imperial Dic- tionary,' London, 1883, gives the following definition and quotation :

" Leet-ale, a feast or merry-making at the hold- ing of a court-leet.

" ' Leet-ale, in some parts of England, signifies the dinner at a court-leet of a manor for the jury and customary tenants.' T. Warton."

Now the Rev. Thomas Warton died in 1745, and his son Thomas Warton, Jun., in 1790, therefore the above quotation from one of their works must have been written before 1796, the date of its appearance in Archceo- logia. EVERARD HOME COLEMAN.

[The list of authors quoted prefixed to Annan- dale's fourth volume states that T. Warton died i / yu. j

There is a reference to the court-leet appointing ale-tasters or ale-founders in the late Mr. W. T. Marchant's exhaustive and highly interesting book of beer-lore * In Praise of Ale,' p. 52. There we learn that " in the old Court Rolls the ale-tasters or ale-founders are designated gustatores cerevisice, the terms commonly used in the records of the court- FKANCIS P. MAECHANT.

In Drake's ' Hist, of Shakspeare and his limes are enumerated, "as being periods of festivity, the various ales which were ob- served by our ancestors in the sixteenth