US. V. FEB. 3, 1912.]
NOTES AND QUERIES.
95
I extract from the forthcoming third
volume of the ' Register of National Biblio-
graphy ' the statement that No. XI. of the
- Opuscula of the Nottingham Sette of Odde
Volumes ' is an account by Mr. J. P. Briscoe of the Robin Hood literature which was, in 1898, in the Nottingham Free Public Library.
The inquirer should also look at the communication on Robin Hood plays in
- N. & Q.,' 10 S. viii. 295 (1907).
W. P. COURTNEY.
" QTJAM NIHIL AD GENITOI, PAPINIANE' TUTJM" (11 S. iv. 325, 531). The conclusion at which I have arrived with regard to the authorship of the above line is that it is a quotation, as we find it printed in Drayton's ' Polyolbion,' but that Selden himself did not know who was the author. Throughout his ' Address to the Reader ' (in which the line occurs), as well as in his ' Illustrations of the Polyolbion ' (ed. 1622), Selden prints his Latin quotations in italics, and always in lines separated from the text sometimes giving the name of the author of the quota- tion in the margin, sometimes in the text itself. This seems to indicate that the line is a quotation (inasmuch as it is printed, like the other Latin quotations, in italic and as a separate line) ; while, its authorship being unassigned, it would seem that it was not traceable to any known author.
There is . nothing, I think, that precludes the supposition that this noteworthy elegiac may have had its origin in days as far back as those of Sir John Cheke (1514-47) or Walter Haddan (1516-72), when the fre- quent conflicts between the " common lawyers " and the " civilians "* were at their height, and when its epigrammatic smartness would be likely to render it especially acceptable to the lawyers of the Inner Temple as a neat and forcible utter- ance wherewith to intimate their contempt, whenever occasion offered, for " civilians " and their ways ; or, again, as I at first conjectured, it may have been a gloss, by some impatient student, on the margin of a manuscript of Baldus or Accursius.
But if, on the other hand, it is maintained that Selden was both coiner and quoter, he is necessarily made liable to the imputation of having sought to palm off upon the reader a line of his own composition as a quotation from some Latin author whom he
" In the Civill Law, I comprehend also the
Canonist, and use hath here [i.e., in England]
made the name of Civill Law to include both Civil,
and Canon." -Selden, ' Hist, of Tithes ' (1618)1
Preface, p. xvii.
prefers not to name ; and this, it would
seem, simply in order to invest with an air
of classic authority his own depreciatory
estimate of the " civilians " of his own day !
On the value of a quotation from an original
Latin author in those times, especially when
it was sought to gain the suffrages of the
ordinary man of letters, it is unnecessary,
in these columns, to insist.
I may further note that Selden himself rarely names Papinian only, I think, in his ' Opera Omnia ' (ed. Wilkins), i. col. 1404, and in his ' Historie of Tithes ' (1618), p. 38 ; and the composer of the line, whoever he was, may have been simply yielding to the exigencies of elegiac verse in preferring Papinian to Ulpian or Gaius.
J. BASS MTTLUNGEB.'
GUISE: GREY: BADGER (11 S. v. 27). Although " the gray " was an old English name for the badger, as " grice " was the name for its young, it seems improbable that the " gris " so much worn by the highest in the land during the Middle Ages, should be the skin of the badger, which in those days was a common animal in Great Britain. "Gris" was certainly expensive, and seems most probably to have been a species of foreign marten. Chaucer, in the Prologue of ' The Canterbury Tales,' says of the pilgrim monk,
No eoste wolde he spare ;
I saw his sieves purfiled at the hond With gris, and that the finest of the lond.
In a very ancient poem quoted by Ritson, a merchant, wishing to dress his lady-love in " ryall atyre,"
Boght hur gownys of grete pryce Furryd with menyvere and with gryce..
Fairholt says : "In the Middle Ages the fur of the ermine and the sable ranked highest, that of the vair and the gray was next in esteem." Vair or vaire was undoubtedly minever, the name continuing in heraldry. In ' Sir Percival de Galles,' a romance of the
fourteenth century, when the son asks
how he should recognize a knight, ^his
mother "shewede hym the mene vaire " in
their hoods by which he might know them.
Menage in ' Termes du vieux francais.
MD.CCI,.,' under ' Vair,' quotes
Li autre couroit les piaux
Des curieux, de gris & de vairs,
Pour moi forrer en temps divers.
Ovide, MS.
and under ' Menuvair ' he says, " d'un animal dit vair."
Menu, of course, means small, and some- times we find the fur described in two
