Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 12.djvu/474

This page needs to be proofread.

466


NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. xn. DEC. n, 1915.


MRS. SAMUEL FOOTE (US. xii. 260, 307, 347, 370). Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, in his life of Samuel Foote, has a good deal to say about his alleged marriage and the way he kept his wife in the background till they were finally separated. He joins issue with John Forster, who, as I have already pointed out, discredited the story of Foote's marriage altogether. Mr. Fitzgerald does not give the lady's maiden name, and what he has to say really takes the matter no further than the correspondence that has already .appeared in ' N. & Q.' on the subject. We may be satisfied that so painstaking and thorough a biographer as Mr. Fitzgerald would be sure to have exhausted every available source of information, but unless and until some convincing proof from a registry office or church can be adduced, the question whether Samuel Foote ever was married is still shrouded in ambiguity.

WlLLOUGHBY MAYCOCK.


SISTERS OF BENNET LANGTON (11 S. xii. 342, 391). The late Canon Maddison in his

  • Lincolnshire Pedigrees ' gives two sisters :

Juliet, who married the Rev. Wm. Bracken- bury, and Diana, who married Robt. Uvedale, D.D., Rector of Langton, and Vicar of Swineshead, and who died in 1809, aged 67. Their father was also named Bennet Langton of Langton, who died in 1769, aged 73, and their mother was Diana, daughter of Edmund Turner of Stoke Rochford. W. M. MYDDELTON.

Woodhall Spa.

HEBREW DIETETICS (US. xii. 334, 405). In answer to C. C. B.'s kindly inquiries at the latter reference and to MR. LANDFEAR LUCAS, ante, p. 380, 1 should like to say how gratified I am to find that these Talmudic matters possess a live interest. I will endeavour to make some researches on the lines suggested by C. C. B. Meanwhile, I may say that Wootton's observations on Biblical medicine are to me altogether in- comprehensible. C. C. B. draws a curious inference therefrom, viz., that the early Hebrews " had little medical lore." I will answer that at once by a citation from Berachoth, lOb. Commenting on the pas- sage in Isa. xxxviii. 3, Rabbi Levi suggests that " the good King Hezekiah did to his generation " lay in concealing the Book of Pharmacy " (Sipher Rephuous). Surely a nation careful to a meticulous degree in Tegard to the healthiness of animals selected for consumption (a point that Sir William Osier made in his learned contribution to


the Menorah Magazine) would also possess a considerable store of medical knowledge adapted to human needs. Tractate Chu- lin is a mine of surgical and pathological science. As a matter of fact, medicine was a favourite study among the ancient Hebrews, since it raised the status of prac- titioners in public estimation the physician was commonly described as the Malloch Adounoi (the Messenger of God). In Burton's ' Anatomy of Melancholy ' many mediaeval surgeons of Hebrew extraction are named, from whom Burton borrows most extensively. Bar Hebrseus and Moses Mizraim are names that recur to my mind as I write. M. L. R. BRESLAR.

Bows AND ARROWS IN THE CRIMEAN WAR (US. xii. 342, 406). The use of bows and arrows against British troops is later than the Jynteah campaign of 1863. Sir C. Macgregor reported serious losses from arrows in the Bhotan campaign of 1865. Some of the Tibetans who opposed our advance in 19034 were armed with bows and arrows.

W. CROOKE.

"SKIFFLES" (11 S. xii. 400). As a guess, souffles. YGREC.

ESSEX PLACE-NAME (US. xii. 380). If P. D. M. will search ' Kelly's Directory ' for Essex, taking parish by parish, running his eye down " Farmers," he will probably find Coxsdell. I have recently had a Cornish instance where the name of an ancient mansion was perfectly preserved in that of the present farm. W. H. QUARRELL.

QUIT- RENT OF A CLOVE (11 S. xii. 392). Is it certain that a clove as quit- rent was a clove-gilliflower ? Writing far from access to the Calendar of Inquisitions, I cannot verify the rendering of the text ; but I venture to think that the words rendered as a clove- gilliflower may have been cloue de girofle or gelofre, meaning a spice clove, and that this clove may possibly have preceded the pepper- corn quit-rent, for which the earliest quota- tion in the ' N.E.D.' is of 1607. There is a curious connexion between pepper and cloves in the Proveii9al pebre giroufla, clove-pepper, cardamom, pointing to the possibility of peppercorns having succeeded cloves or cardamoms as a spice quit-rent.

I have specified the clove as spice because there is a third meaning of " clove " the sixteenth part of the Plantagenet long hundredweight. This was originally a nail, the name being borrowed from the nail, the sixteenth part of an ell or yard (10 S. iii. 41).