Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853

"I know each lane, and every alley green,
And every bosky bourn from side to side."—Milton.

    M.

CHRISTIAN NAMES

(Vol. vii., pp. 406. 488, 489.)

The opinion of your correspondents, that instances of persons having more than one Christian name before the last century are, at least, very rare, is borne out by the learned Camden, who, however, enables me to adduce two earlier instances of polyonomy than those cited by J. J. H.:

"Two Christian names," says he (Remaines concerning Britaine, p. 44.), "are rare in England, and I onely remember now his majesty, who was named Charles James, and the prince his sonne Henry Frederic; and among private men, Thomas Maria Wingfield, and Sir Thomas Posthumous Hobby."

The custom must have been still rare at the end of the eighteenth century, for, as we are informed by Moore in a note to his Fudge Family in Paris (Letter IV.):

"The late Lord C. (Castlereagh?) of Ireland had a curious theory about names; he held that every man with three names was a Jacobin. His instances in Ireland were numerous; Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Theobald Wolfe Tone, James Napper Tandy, John Philpot Curran, &c.: and in England he produced as examples, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John Horne Tooke, Francis Burdett Jones," &c.

Perhaps the noble lord thought with Sterne in Tristram Shandy, though the nexus is not easy to discover, that "there is a strange kind of magic bias, which good or bad names irresistibly impose upon our character and conduct," or perhaps he had misread that controverted passage in Plautus (Aulular. Act II. Sc. 4.):

"Tun' trium literarum homo
Me vituperas? Fur."

The custom is now almost universal; and as, according to Camden (Remaines, &c., p. 96.),

"Shortly after the Conquest it seemed a disgrace for a gentleman to have but one single name, as the meaner sort and bastards had,"

so now, the tria nomina nobiliorum have become so common, as to render the epigram upon a certain M. L-P. Saint-Florentin, of almost universal applicability as a neat and befitting epitaph.

"On ne lui avait pas épargné," says the biographer of this gentleman (Biographie Universelle, tom. xxxix. p. 573.), "les épigrammes de son vivant; il en parut encore contre lui au moment de sa mort; en voici une:—

'Ci gît un petit homme à l'air assez commun,
Ayant porté trois noms, et n'en laissant aucun.'"

    William Bates.
Birmingham.

Leopold William Finch, fifth son of Heneage, second Earl of Nottingham, born about the year 1662, and afterwards Warden of All Souls, is an earlier instance of an English person with two Christian names than your correspondent J. J. H. has noticed.

    J. B.

WEATHER RULES

(Vol. vii., p. 522.)

Your correspondent J. A., Jun., makes a Note and asks a question regarding a popular opinion prevalent in Worcestershire, on the subject of a "Sunday's moon," as being one very much addicted to rain. In Sussex that bad repute attaches to the moon that changes on Saturday:

"A Saturday's moon,
If it comes once in seven years, it comes too soon."

It may be hoped that the time is not far distant when a scientific meteorology will dissipate the errors of the traditional code now in existence. Of these errors none have greater or more extensive prevalence than the superstitions regarding the influence of the moon on the atmospheric phenomena of wet and dry weather. Howard, the author of The Climate of London, after twenty years of close observation, could not determine that the moon had any perceptible influence on the weather. And the best authorities now follow, still more decidedly, in the same train.

"The change of the moon," the expression in general use in predictions of the weather, is idly and inconsiderately used by educated people, without considering that in every phase that planet is the same to us, as a material agent, except as regards the power of reflected light; and no one supposes that moonlight produces wet or dry. Why then should that point in the moon's course, which we agree to call "the new" when it begins to emerge from the sun's rays, have any influence on our weather. Twice in each revolution, when in conjunction with the sun at new, and in opposition at the full, an atmospheric spring-tide may be supposed to exist, and to exert some sort of influence. But the existence of any atmospheric tide at all is denied by some naturalists, and is at most very problematical; and the absence of regular diurnal fluctuations of the barometric pressure favours the negative of this proposition. But, granting that it were so, and that the moon, in what is conventionally called the beginning of its course, and again in the middle, at the full, did produce changes in the weather, surely the most sanguine of rational lunarians would discard the idea of one moon differing from another, except in relation to the season of the year; or that a new moon on the Sabbath day, whether Jewish or Christian, had any special quality not shared by the new moons of any other days of the week.

Such a publication as "N. & Q." is not the place to discuss fully the question of lunar influence. Your correspondent J. A., Jun., and all persons who have inconsiderately taken up the popular belief in moon-weather, will do well to consult an interesting article on this subject (I believe attributed to Sir D. Brewster) in The Monthly Chronicle for 1838; and this will also refer such inquirers to Arago's Annuaire for 1833. There may be later and completer disquisitions on the lunar influences, but they are not known to me.

    M.

ROCOCO

(Vol. i., pp. 321. 356.)

This word is now receiving a curious illustration in this colony of French origin. Rococo—antiquated, old-fashioned—would seem to have become rococo itself; and in its place the negroes have adopted the word entêté, wilful, headstrong, to express, as it were, the persistence of a person in retaining anything that has gone out of fashion. This term was first applied to white hats; and the wearers of such have been assailed from every corner of the streets with the cry of "Entêté chapeau!" It was next applied to umbrellas of a strange colour (the varieties of which are almost without number in this country of the sun); and it has now been extended to every article of wearing apparel of an unfashionable or peculiar shape. A negro woman, appearing with a blue umbrella, has been followed by half a dozen black boys with the cry of "Entêté parasol!" and in order to get rid of the annoyance she had to shut the umbrella and continue her way under the broiling sun. But the term is not always used in derision. A few days ago, a young girl of colour, dressed in the extreme of the fashion, was passing along, when some bystanders began to rally her with the word "Entêté." The girl, perceiving that she was the object of their notice, turned round, and in an attitude of conscious irreproachableness, retorted with the challenge in Creole French, "Qui entêté ça?" But the smiles with which she was greeted showed her (what she had already partly suspected) that their cries of "Entêté" were intended rather to compliment her on the style of her dress.

    Henry H. Breen.

St. Lucia.

DESCENDANTS OF JOHN OF GAUNT

(Vol. vii., p. 41.)

I am gratified to see that Mr. Hardy's documentary researches have confirmed my conjectures as to the erroneous date assigned for the death of the first husband of Jane Beaufort. Perhaps it may be in his power also to rectify a chronological error, which has crept into the account usually given of the family into which one of her sons married. The Peerages all place the death of the last Lord Fauconberg of the original family in 1376, not observing that this date would make his daughter and heiress married to William Nevill, second son of the Earl of Westmoreland and Countess Joane, twenty-five years at the lowest computation; or, if we take the date which they assign for the death of Lord Ferrers of Wemme, forty years older than her husband,—a difference this, which, although perhaps it might not prove an insuperable impediment to marriage where the lady was a great heiress, would undoubtedly put a bar on all hopes of issue: whereas it stands on record that they had a family.

I must take this opportunity of complaining of the manner in which many, if not all these Peerages, are compiled: copying each others' errors, however obvious, without a word of doubt or an attempt to rectify them; though Mr. Hardy's communication, above mentioned, shows that the materials for doing so, in many cases, exist if properly sought. Not to mention minor errors, they sometimes crowd into a given time more generations than could have possibly existed, and sometimes make the generations of a length that has not been witnessed since the patriarchal ages. As instances of the former may be mentioned, the pedigree of the Ferrerses, Earls of Derby (in which eight successions from father to son are given between 1137 and 1265), and those of the Netterville and Tracy families: and of the latter, the pedigree of the Fitzwarines, which gives only four generations between the Conquest and 1314; and that of the Clanricarde family. It is strange that Mr. Burke, who appears to claim descent from the latter, did not take more pains to rectify a point so nearly concerning him; instead of making, as he does in his Peerage, one of the family to have held the title (MacWilliam Eighter) and estates for 105 years!—an absurdity rendered still more glaring by this long-lived gentleman's father having possessed them fifty-four years before him, and his son for fifty-six years after him. If such can be supposed true, the Countess of Desmond's longevity was not so unusual after all.

    J. S. Warden.

THE ORDER OF ST. JOHN OF JERUSALEM

(Vol. vii., p. 407.)

May I be allowed to inform your correspondent R. L. P. that he is in error, when supposing that the English knights were deprived of their property by Queen Elizabeth, as it was done by act of parliament in the year 1534, and during the reign of Henry VIII.

For the information sought by your correspondent R. L. P., I would refer him to the following extract taken from Sutherland's History of the Knights of Malta, vol. ii. pp. 114, 115.:

"To increase the despondency of L'Isle Adam [the Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem], Henry VIII. of England having come to an open rupture with the Pope, in consequence of the Pontiff's steady refusal to countenance the divorcement of Catherine of Arragon his queen, commenced a fierce and bloody persecution against all persons in his dominions, who persisted in adhering to the Holy See. In these circumstances, the Knights of St. John, who held themselves bound to acknowledge the Pope as their superior at whatever hazard, did not long escape his ire. The power of the Order, composed as it was of the chivalry of the nation, while the Prior of London sat in parliament on an equality with the first baron of the realm, for a time deterred him from openly proscribing it; but at length his wrath burst forth in an ungovernable flame. The knights Ingley, Adrian Forrest, Adrian Fortescu, and Marmaduke Bohus, refusing to abjure their faith, perished on the scaffold. Thomas Mytton and Edward Waldegrave died in a dungeon; and Richard and James Bell, John Noel, and many others, abandoned their country for ever, and sought an asylum at Malta[4 - I have sought in vain among the records of the Order at this island to find any mention made of those English knights, whom Sutherland thus mentions as having fled to Malta at the time of this persecution in their native land.], completely stripped of their possessions. In 1534, by an act of the legislature, the Order of St. John was abolished in the King of England's dominions; and such knights as survived the persecution, but who refused to stoop to the conditions offered them, were thrown entirely on the charity of their brethren at Malta. Henry offered Sir Wm. Weston, Lord Prior of England, a pension of a thousand pounds a year; but that knight was so overwhelmed with grief at the suppression of his Order, that he never received a penny, but soon after died. Other knights, less scrupulous, became pensioners of the crown."

    W. W.

La Valetta, Malta.

Replies to Minor Queries

Anticipatory Worship of the Cross (Vol. vii., p. 548.).—A correspondent wishes for farther information on the anticipatory worship of the cross in Mexico and at Alexandria. At the present moment I am unable to refer to the works on which I grounded the statement which he quotes. He will, however, find the details respecting Mexico in Stephens's Travels in Yucatan; and those respecting Alexandria in the commentators on Sozomen (H. E., vii. 15.), and Socrates (H. E., v. 16.). A similar instance is the worship of the Cross Fylfotte in Thibet.

    The Writer of "Communications with the Unseen World."

Ennui (Vol. vii., p. 478.).—