436
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. v. JUNE i, 1912.
BELASYSE (11 S. v. 269). The Thomas
Edward Wynn Belasyse about whom Miss
WILLIAMS inquires is identical with the
Thomas Edward Wynn who married Lady
Charlotte Belasyse, eldest daughter of
Henry Belasyse, second and last Earl
Fauconberg of Newborough, by his first
marriage, in 1766, with Charlotte, only
daughter of Sir Matthew Lamb of Brocket
Hall, co. Hertford, Bart.
Thomas Edward Wynn was third son of Col. Glynn W T ynn (whom he succeeded as Prothonotary), and assumed the surname and arms of Belasyse, in addition to his own, upon his marriage.
The mother of Lady Charlotte Belasyse was sister to the first Viscount Melbourne ; her grandmother was Charlotte, daughter of the Right Hon. Thomas Coke of Melbourne Hall, co. Derby, by his first wife Mary Hale (a Maid of Honour to Queen Anne, and first cousin to William Hale of King's Walden, co. Herts, who married Elizabeth, youngest daughter of my great- great - great - great - grandunele. Sir Charles Farnaby, first baronet), daughter of Richard Hale by his wife Eliza Meynell (who married, secondly, the Hon. Robert Cecil, second son of James, third Earl of Salisbury), daughter of Isaac Meynell.
I shall be pleased to give TVIiss WILLIAMS the descent of Lady Charlotte Belasyse's great - great grandmother, Eliza Meynell, from Richard de Menil(who died 1376), from whom I have a direct descent, if of any service to her ; also the lineage of Lady Charlotte's great-grandmother, Mary Hale. " FRANCIS H. RELTON.
9, Broughton Road. Thornton Heath, Surrey.
THE THAMES : VORTIGERN ( 1 1 S. v. 45, 225 332, 378). At the last reference SIR HER- BERT MAXWELL offers an explanation of the personal name Vortigern to which serious objections may be made. His equations are " Vortigern = mawr teyrn magnus tyran mis." I will only deal with the identifica tion of Vortigern with mawr teyrn. This is an impossible equation. Vor cannot repre sent Welsh mawr because initial m couk not suffer aspiration, could not become ml and then v in the first element of a com pound name. Again, vor cannot represen mawr because in old Celtic names, com- pounded of two elements, the adjective does not precede the substantive which it qualifies, and consequently the adjective mdros (whence Welsh miwr) is constantly found in Gaulish place-names as the second
lement of the word, as may be seen from
he many instances given by Whitley
Stokes in his ' Old Celtic Dictionary '
1894), p. 201.
The name Vortigern means probably ' Over-lord." The old Cymric form would liave been Quor-tigem = old Celtic Ver-teger- nios, from ver, " over " -}-tegernios, "lord." the word meaning literally " he of the house." Tegcrnios is a derivative of legos (Welsh ty) f " a house." A. L. MAYHEW.
Oxford.
NAPOLEON'S EMBLEM OF THE BEE (US. v. 288). In 1653, while some trenches were being cut near the church of St. Brice at Tournai, a tomb was discovered which there seems reason to believe was that of Chil- deric I., who died in the neighbourhood in 481- In it were found many things of interest., including some curiously shaped objects of gold inlaid with enamel generally de- scribed as " bees," of which some illustra- tions may be seen in Bernard de Montfaucon's ' A Collection of Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France ; (London, 1750). An account of this discovery was published by Chifflet. who suggested that in these " bees " was preserved the primitive form of the fleur-de-lis. This idea was seized upon and developed by Du Bos. Mho wrote (I quote from Pierre Larousse's ' Grand Diction- naire universel du XIX e Siecle,' art. ' Fleur '):
" Childeric, suivant toutes les apparences, portoit ces petites figures cousues sur son vetement, parce que la tribu des Francs, sur laquelle il re'gnoit, avoit pris les abeilles pour son symbole, et qu'elle en parseraoit ses enseignes. Les nations germaniques, dont les Francs faisoient partie, prenoient chacune pour son symbole, au rapport de (Jluvier, quelque animal dont elle portoit la figure sur ses enseignes. Je crois menie que ces abeilles, par la faute des peintres et des seulpteurs, sont devetmes nos fleurs de lis, lorsque, dans le xij e siecle, la France et les autres Etats de la chretiente commencerent a prendre des arnies blasonnees."
Many of these "bees" were sent to Louis XIV. and preserved at Versailles (see ' Crowns and Coronations,' by W. Jones, p. 365), and Napoleon, apparently believing Du Bos's statement that the bee was the heraldic badge (if one may call it so) of the early Frankish kings, chose it as his emblem. The first time he used it was at his coronation as Emperor of the French, on which occasion
j it is recorded that he wore " a short cloak adorned with bees," no doubt for the same reason as that which led him to have the insignia and sword of Charlemagne brought to Paris from Aix-la-Chapelle in order, as
! Dr. Holland Rose has said, to " shed on the
