136
NOTES AND QUERIES. m a m. FEB. is, 1911.
gained two victories in Lincolnshire. One
of these, within about two miles of Grantham,
forms the subject of the first of Cromwell's
letters to appear in the newspapers. He
chased the enemy for two or three miles, but
no mention is made of a hill in the conflict.
The other engagement, within two miles of
Gainsborough, was fought on a hill, and one
of the fields is said still to bear the name of
" Redcoats Field." May not the latter,
wrongly placed on the map, be the Red hill
where the battle took place ? W SCOTT.
There was a battle at Grantham during the Civil War, but the year was 1643, and not 1655. It was Cromwell's first victory, and was fought on 13 May, 1643. Informa- tion respecting it will be found in Carlyle's ' Cromwell,' letter No. 5 ; Kingston's ' East Anglia and the Civil War,' p. 112 ; Gardiner's ' History of the Civil War ' ; and Horton's ' Life of Cromwell,' p. 28, and other Lives.
In 1655 Cromwell was Lord Protector, and though there were Royalist risings in that year, I fail to find any trace of another action at Grantham. Possibly the date on the ordnance map may not be correct.
G. H. W.
" GOULANDS " IN BEN JONSON (11 S. ii. 429, 532). I am afraid the Provencal gauch will not help us at all. There is no difficulty in accounting for the ow. As the ' N.E.D.' shows, the original form was gollan, whence goulan and gouland. Gowan resulted from the loss of I in goulan or gowlan ; this I is easily lost in Scottish, which has /a' for fall, and the like. I point out, in my ' Ety- mological Dictionary,' that the word is certainly Scandinavian, as so many Scotcl words are. I derive it from the Norse gul-r, yellow, Swed. gul, Dan. guul, Norw gul, gaul Observe the last of these forms But I have no objection to connecting it as the ' N.E.D.' suggests, with the word gold which is closely related to O.N. gul-r. The Norse for " gold " was gull, oldest forn goll, which io nothing but gold (or an older
- golth) with the assimilation of Id (or Ith)
into II. Hence was formed the adj. gullin golden, which is, practically, all we want The change from gullin to gollan raises no great difficulty. Gowan is parallel to the English golden, with ow for oil, and oil for old. That this is the easiest and most likely solution will appear to any one who will take the trouble to investigate the large number of flower-names with which the Icol. gulr is associated. Swedish has gul- sippa, yellow wood-anemone ; gul-torne,
urze or gor.se, lit. yellow thorn ; gull-pudra,
golden saxifrage ; gull-regn, laburnum ?
ull-ris, golden-rod ; gull-traf, evening-
)rimrose ; gull-vifva, yellow primrose ; and
here are plenty more in Norwegian and
Danish. WALTER W. SKEAT.
The suggestion that gowan is derived rom the same root as Scotch gowd, gold, ill, I believe, have to be given up. The E.D.D.' regards the word as sprung from rael. gugan, a bud, flower, daisy ; though Jamieson is inclined to suspect -this as merely ,aken over from the Scotch vernacular. I ind, however, in Norman Macleod's ' Gaelic Dictionary ' the words gucag, a bell, bubble y drop ; sprout, bud, corolla of a flower ; and gucagach, bud-bearing, sprouting, clustered ; e in O'Reilly's ' Irish Dictionary ' occur gugan, bud ; gucog, sprout, bud, bell ; and gucogac, clustering, gowaned, which seems to justify the etymology advanced the ' E.D.D.,' the pronunciation of and g in Celtic being often very much alike. N. W. HILL.
The children with me when we went " May blobbin " called the flowers " gowden gow- Lans," and when we made flowers into gar- lands these were " gowlans." On many a cottage " best room " there were " gowlans ". of birds' eggs hanging on the walls. Seldom was the word " garland " pronounced except " gowlan " that is, in the Derbyshire village where I was born. THOS. RATCLIFFE.
AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED (11 S. ii. 229). The words " Beatitudo non est divinorum cognitio, sed vita divina," about which L. S. M. inquires, are the heading of the second section from Porphyry's ' De Ab- stinentia Animalium,' given in Marsilius Ficinus's Latin translation on p. 296 of a volume printed at Geneva in 1607 that con- tains his version of lamblichus, ' De Mys- teriis,' his ' Excerpta ex Graecis Procli Com- mentariis in Alcibiadem Platonis primum,' &c. EDWARD BENSLY.
LACY AS A PLACE-NAME (11 S. iii. 8). The suffix Lacy clearly has reference to a former owner, and may be compared with the suffix Lucy, found at Hampton-Lucy in Warwickshire. Hampton being a common place-name, this particular Hampton i& distinguished from other Hamptons by having the owner's name tacked to it.
MR. SCHLOSSER will probably find that Polesden and Wilton were formerly part of the possessions of the Lacy family, though Camilla seems an* uncommon name, and
