Playing Cards Sixty Years Ago (12 S. i. 468).—Obviously General Anson had seen, the portrait of the Great Mogul many a time and oft on the ace of spades, that particular "duty" card having been so embellished in the best packs—i.e., the "Mogul packs," as they were termed—long prior to sixty years ago. Indeed, the design formed the subject of an action in the High Court of Chancery as far back as 1742. A motion was made by the plaintiff, Blanchard, to restrain the defendant, Hill, from making use of the Great Mogul as a stamp upon his cards, he maintaining that he had invented the mark, and consequently had the sole right to use it. He lost his case, however, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke holding that he knew no instance of restraining one trader from making use of the same mark with another. (See 6 S. xi. 472 and 9 S. v. 292.)
Penge as a Place-Name (12 S. i. 228 (v. sub 'Anerley'), 312, 433).—I gather from Mr. N. W. Hill's assertion that the "A.-S. pynca is an appropriate name for an outlying portion of a parish," that "Pinkie" in Scotland, which he equates with "Penge" (an outlying portion of Battersea), falls under the same category. It is a far cry from Penge to Pinkie, and I wonder from which of the two place-names it was that MR. HILL derived the clue to the unique meaning he assigns to both. No phonetic reason is given for equating Pinkie with Penge. It may be admitted that nc in pynca might become nch at a pinch, but an inch is not an 'inge.
I equate "Penge" with the nearer "Panga," and those readers who have consulted the late Prof. Skeat's book on 'The Place-Names of Berkshire' (1911), p. 17, will remember that he derived the name of the river Pang thus: *Pæginga> "Pægeinga"> *Payinga> *Painga> "Panga." The first form quoted does not date from 844, as Mr. Hy. Harrison says, but from 833 or 834. The second form quoted occurs in 957.
I regret that Mr. Hill did not consult Prof. Skeat. He would have found that *Pæginga did not originate with myself, and that it is postulated by documentary evidence. Moreover, he would not have come to the conclusion that it would be "most unwise to quote Penge as an example of patronymic origin."
Dogmatic statements that are incorrect will certainly not help any one to surmount the difficulties that are evoked by guessing the source of a place-name beforehand. But statements that are dogmatic are not necessarily incorrect, and in his anxiety to avoid dogmatism Mr. Harrison has unconsciously become self-contradictory. At the beginning of his reply he says that Penge "probably goes back to the earliest period of the A.-S. settlement." At the end he derives Peng- "from the normal Old Kentish form, *pengan, of A.-S. pyngan or pingan, to prick." But pyngan is not A.-S. It is derived thus: pung-ere (Latin, to prick)> O.E. *pung-ian> pyng-an, to prick. So, if Mr. Harrison is correct, our ancestors must have borrowed the Latin stem pung- as soon as they arrived. But there is another difficulty: in Old Kentish y did not yield place to e for four hundred years after the A.-S. settlement—not till the ninth century, in fact, vide Prof. Wright, 'O.E. Grammar,' §112, note 1, and 132.
We are dealing with an Anglo-Saxon P-word, and that should excite the suspicion of every investigator who is unwilling either to be led by appearances or to take his cues from the accidental similarities of resultants. Initial p is not O.E. The poem of 'Beowulf' has not a single p-word in it; v. Prof. Sedgefield's Indexes to his edition (1910), pp. 251, 292. In Moritz Heyne's Index to his edition of 1879 this fact is emphasized on p. 233 by the giving of the three -p-words which occur in 'Beowulf' as deuterothemes. Consequently, when Mr. Harrison assures us that "Pago" is not an A.-S. form "at all," he is quite right: it is neither Saxon nor Angle. The Angles and the Saxons were not the only Germanic tribes to settle in the Britannias. The O.E. for Pāgo is Bōga.
Mr. Harrison remarks that "our ancestors did not put personal names in the genitive plural unless they were followed by a local name," and for that faulty reason he rejects *Pænga> "Pænge." But when the scribe of the 957 charter wrote "se wude þe hatte Pænge," what he had in mind was Pænge-wude, and that postulates an earlier *Pænga-wudu. Pænge-wude signifies se wude þe hatte Pænge, just as "Theobalds Road" signifies "the road called Theobald's."
The place-names "Genge" and "Penge" are derived as follows:—
*Gæginga> "Gæginge"> "Gainge"> Genge.
*Pæginga> "Pægeinge"> "Pænge "> Penge.
Cp. Prof Skeat with respect to Genge and Pang, pp. 67, 17. The P and the palatalization of -ng- in "Pǣnge" are Kentish, i.e., Jutish; and West Saxon æ was regularly
