Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/96

88 is "mingle-mangled" thus in Drayton's text. Lindsey loq.:

A foot-note is appended which flatly contradicts:

Another familiar rhyme is thus disguised. It was decreed

"Heading Halifax" is due to the summary capital punishment which it was formerly the privilege of the burghers of this place to apply to men taken in the act of stealing cloth. "From Hell, Hull, and Halifax deliver us," was part of a mock litany used by beggars in earlier and less squeamish times than these.

Drayton knew Croggen as being a nickname for the Welsh; this form of insult is, I believe, now extinct, though the word lives on as a surname. "The first cause of this name take thus: In one of Henry the 2nd's expeditions into Wales, divers of his camp, sent to assay a passage over Offa's dyke at Crogen Castle, were entertained with prevention by the British forces, most of them there slain, and to present view yet lying buried. Afterward, this word Crogen the English used to the Welsh, but as remembering cause of revenge for such slaughter, although time hath made it usual in ignorant mouths as a disgraceful attribute."

One should have read everything, and have remembered it too, in order to know which of Drayton's lines that have a proverbial ring about them were current coinage, and which the issue of his own mint. Sonnet LIX. To Proverbs is, however, confessedly a patchwork of popular wise sayings: