ITALIAN MAYORS (cliv. 63). Of course your correspondent is aware that the podestà was a stranger called in to administer the affairs of Italian republics in the Middle Ages for one year, and given almost unlimited power during that term. The revival of this title in the present day is a sign of the extinction of municipal freedom in Italy in favour of an arbitrary magistrate appointed direct by the Fascist government, and responsible directly to that and to that only. A. H. COOPER-PRICHARD. SIR THOMAS WHITE AND THE KIBBLEWHITES OF SOUTH FAW The Library. The English Navy in the Revolution of 1688. By E. B. Powley. (Cambridge University Press. 12s. 6d. net). 66 PERHAPS Mr. Powley claims too much for the part played by the Navy in the Revolution of 1688 when he says that it was obviously important." Little investigation has been expended on it precisely because its importance, so far from being obvious, may be said to have been, in appearance at least, negligible. Numer. ically a good deal below the strength required by the occasion, handled by a competent, though not a brilliant, seaman, and pursued by ill-luck in the way of wind and weather, the Fleet, having come out from the Gunfleet on Oct. 10, was still, on Nov. 3, unable to weather Longsand Head, while the Dutch fleet-so much more considerable than account had made it-with its multitude of transports sailed boldly through the Straits and into the Channel. The LEY, BERKS (cliv. 45). This family (White) is puzzling, but as I have found other cases of grants of arms totally different given to families related it is not surprising to find the White family among the number. The Heralds apparently had bad memories. The Kibblewhites were to be found in different parts of Berks Apparently the family of White, recorded in the Visitation of Hamp-historical We discuss, indeed, briefly but very shire, came from Surrey, and was distinct from the Berkshire families. I possess some interesting letters written years ago to Mr. Minns, when editor of the Hants Field Club, by B. Greenfield, a clever antiquary, on the subject, describing the four coats of arms allotted to the White families. The Hants Field Club was a Southampton Society and Mr. Greenfield was a Southamp wind never served for effective pursuit, though The con day by day and quotes abundantly from offi We next see for Mr. Powley carries us on cial correspondence the detailed problems and possibilities of the defence. Above all, these are opened up in the correspondence and the order taken as to the anchorage of the Fleet. There was some doubt whether William would not attempt a landing on the east coast; there was the Thames must be guarded. Effectual guard certainty that above all things the entrance to the sands, where the activity and striking power of the Thames meant, however, a station behind of the Fleet would be more hopelessly than anywhere at the mercy of wind and tide. The strong element of the incalculable, of "luck," interwoven in all naval affairs, especially in the old sailing-days, was increased by the season of the year; and luck" was never more conspicuously all on one side than in this expedition of William of Orange. There was something more: Dartmouth himself was loyal to the King, but disaffection was busy in and out of his ships. James, in the earlier part of the story, commands respect: indeed, it is as Lord High Admiral that he is apt to show best. The absurd attempt to smuggle the baby Prince out of England, and then his own flight appear from the naval point of view as deplorable as from any other. Dartmouth sent letters of manly protest and sensible advice which do him great honour. Pepys' part, in organization and counsel and forwarding of information is naturally a predominant one and makes one of the principal features of the book. Mr. Powley's workmanship is unusually good. The amount of research behind these pages is shown, not merely by the abundant references to a vast quantity of material, but also by the combination of minuteness and balance in the presentation of facts throughout the text. His style, too-not over smooth-is very readable, and so full and lively is the narrative that this story, in itself so dismal, is seen to have significance worth mastering. There are an excellent chart, and a good, classified index. Medieval Plays in Scotland. By Anna Jean Mill. (Blackwood and Sons). THE existing records of folk-plays, court revels and municipal plays in Scotland bear witness to the people's participation in the almost universal mediæval drama. They refer to old-established rights and customs, to traditions taken for granted; they are of medieval character. But actually only a small fraction of them belong in themselves to the true Middle Ages; the sixteenth century, with most of them, is already in possession. And they afford, too, but slender indication of what was actually performed, whether in the way of mumming, ог religious procession. The material for Miss Mill's study consists chiefly of disjointed fragments, excerpts from public documents, chiefly local. More than half of this volume is devoted to setting out these original sources, and it would be difficult to praise too highly either the skill and thoroughness of Miss Mill's search for documents or the scholarly patience with which she has transcribed or verified or annotated them. The chapters in which she discusses the general outcome of her labours-chapters on Folk Plays; Minstrelsy; Court Revels and Municipal Plays, with an essay on the Influence of the Reformation and some concluding pages are admirably done, showing not only familiarity with the sources but also wide knowledge of the work done on kindred fields and of the implications alike of folk play and of masques and entertainments. The records, meagre though they are, point back to a time when festivities and amusement occupied the Scots as much as they did other peoples; in fact municipal authorities took very seriously the providing of plasure" for the town, and the task of contriving this for a year's space would daunt the capable townsman so that pressure had to Printed and Published by The Bucks Free be brought to bear on him to undertake it. The love of frolic and fun and their traditional manifestations did not yield easily and everywhere at once to Puritan severity and no doubt Miss Mill is right in imputing the virtual completeness of their disappearance in England. Miss Mill's book will be the main some part to the departure of the Court for authority on her subject for a long while to The Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. By Kenneth Rogers. (The Homeland Association. 4s. 6d. net.). come. THIS is decidedly a good book, in which the student of London will find substantial information. Dr. Rogers has ransacked pretty well all the possible sources, and dealt with all the detail we have, whether in the way of history or in the way of relic, concerning the Boar's Head, by the united voice of tradition the tavern presided over by Dame Quickly and frequented by Falstaff, though mention of it by name is not made by Shakespeare. The records of St. Michael's, Crooked Lane, now in the possession of St. Magnus the Martyr, are the great source of the story of the neighbourhood, and they have yielded particulars of the baptism and burial of Francis Withens (1567-1633/4), donor of a remarkable cup, still in existence, which it is not very extravagant to esteem as the 'parcel-gilt goblet" of Dame Quickly's protestation. Dr. Rogers has collected, from their wills, a few more details of the Withens family. Another group of interesting facts is that concerning Sir William Walworth's chantry at St. Michael's, and Walter de Mordon's bequest of a certain tenementum in Candelwykstrete to St. Michael's. Dr. Rogers, having hunted out the will, discovered that the house in question was a tavern, and since it can hardly be anything but the Boar's Head, this goes some way to refute Stow's statement that the Boar's Head was not known before 1410. Then we come on to William Brooke, 66 Landlord of the Bore's Hedde. Estchepe, 1566"-as a carved box-wood bas-relief of a boar's head has it, unearthed from a mound heaped together at the time of the Great Fire. A very good part of this study is the topography, which, assisting the reader with a map, and drawing matter from Churchwardens' accounts, sets Crooked Lane. and Miles Lane and the Swan Tavern, to say nothing of St. Michael's and its churchyard, in a lively way before us. This little book is worthy its place among the publications of the Homeland Association, and to say that is to pay it no mean compliment. NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS. WHEN sending a letter to be forwarded to another contributor, correspondents are re quested to put in the top left-hand corner of N. & Q' to which the latter refers. Press, Ltd., at their Offices, High Street, Wycombe, in the County of Bucks. WE WILL BUY FOR CASH First Editions and Presentation Copies of Barrie, Conrad, Norman Douglas, Galsworthy, Hardy, Masefield, George Moore, Pater, Shaw, Francis Thompson, Wilde, etc. Sets and Single Volumes, in old calf, of Sir Thos. Browne, Donne, Fielding, Johnson, Locke, Smollett, Sterne, etc. Books with Coloured Plates. Libraries and small lots of books of all kinds. Good prices paid for interesting & scarce items. DEIGHTON, BELL & CO., LTD., 13 & 30 TRINITY STREET, CAMBRIDGE. NOTES AND QUERIES. BINDING CASES FOR VOLUME CLIII. PUBLISHER'S BINDING CASES for VOL. (July-December, 1927) are now on sale, and should be ordered from "NOTES AND QUERIES," 20, High Street, High Wy combe, Bucks, England, direct or through local bookbinders. The Cases are also on sale at our London office, 22, Essex Street, Strand, W.C.2. Price 38., postage 3d. NOTES AND QUERIES is published every Friday, at 20, High Street, High Wycombe, Bucks (Telephone: Wycombe 306). Subscriptions (£2 28. a year, U.S.A. $10.50, including postage, two half-yearly indexes and two cloth binding cases, or £1 15s. 4d a year, U.S.A. $9, without binding cases) should be sent to the Manager. The London Office is at 22, Essex Street, W.C.2. (Telephone: Central 0396), where the current issue is on sale. Orders for back numbers, indexes and bound volumes should be sent either to London or to Wycombe; letters for the Editor to the London Office. Memorabilia. on IN the February Cornhill the article Thomas Hardy is from the pen of Mr. George King. Many obituary appreciations of Hardy extolled him as a poet, but Mr. King, though allowing that much of his poetry is "thoughtful, dramatic and satiric," esteems most of it as little more than prose in disguise. He does not, perhaps, say much about the novels which we did not know before; he praises Hardy's sense of structure, which he happily inclines to connect with the early studies of Gothic architecture; and notes Hardy's essential gift of reticence, and the power and knowledge with which he unifies human life and the forces of nature. But he writes freshly, and, at the close characterizes well Hardy's peculiar pessimism. 'Shakespeare's Worst,' by A Gadarene, a paper read to a club after dinner to give them something to contradict, contains several things not very difficult to counter for much of it is founded on the principle that you must not give actors on the stage things to do or say which people in like situations would not do or say in real life: but there are several points, also, in which the dramatist would be hard to defend convincinglyhis taste in jests, for example, which before now has been glanced at askance, and the leap down Dover cliff in King Lear,' and the plot of Much Ado about Nothing." interesting short papers are Mr. J. Keighley Snowden's on Charlotte Brontë (an answer to the observations of the Abbé Dimnet) and Mr. E. S. Roscoe's 'Dr. Johnson at Har wich.' Mrs. Elizabeth Walmsley gives us in 'At the Sign of the Nimble Rabbit' an ་ Two house at Daylesford, from the house of the blessed Mr. Hastings,' as he was called in the family." Mr. C. H. P. Mayo continues his Reminiscences of Harrow, and Mr. P. R. Krishnaswami his study of the originals of Thackeray's characters, this time the Rev. Charles Honeyman, in whom he traces details of resemblance with W. H. Brookfield. THE French Police-The Times correspond The ent reports from Paris-have now taken a hand in the Glozel controversy. grounds for their action are a public complaint preferred by the president of the Prehistoric Society of France, M. Félix Regnault, charging some person unknown with fraud; setting forth evidence and statements of authorities in support of the charge; urging that the "neolithic field of Glozel is a vast swindle which tends to throw discredit and ridicule upon French science; and pointing out that the alleged fraud is being prosecuted and maintained for pecuniary gain, by a charge of 4 francs for admission to the Museum, and attempts to sell the collection. Accordingly on Saturday, Feb. 26, a commissioner of police from ClermontFerrand, attended by six policemen, appeared at the Fradins' farm, and for five hours they were occupied in searching the premises. They seized a number of objects sufficient to fill two large cases them to Moulins. and have transported The Glozelians are naturally indignant at these proceedings. Dr. Morlet (see The of Justice protesting against the manner in Times, Feb. 28) has written to the Minister which the search was made-violently, he Young Fradin says, and even destructively. M. Regnault. The effect of the action of the joins in the complaint, which is re-butted by Pre-historic Society of France will be to postpone the hearing of the libel action brought by M. Fradin against M. Dussaud. would have involved expert inquiry; for which the anti-Glozelians have now, in effect, substituted the presumably less expert intervention of the local police court at Moulins. THE report of the discovery last week of a tunnel in Old Palace Yard, where excavation is going on, naturally aroused much interest and numerous conjectures. Mr. This |